10-45!

In CO speak, (for those of you who don't know already) 10-45 means "On the way" or "In transit" to whatever location. If someone calls me on my way in and asks for my 10-20 (my location) I will reply "I am 10-45 the Hive".

It seems like there is always somebody going somewhere in the prison. Especially the inmates. They are either going where they want to go or going where they are supposed to go. It depends on the time of day. But there is very little time during any day when they are all locked down in their cells and accounted for all at the same time.

It sounds like a dicey way to run a prison, I know. But it usually works out. Not too many of them have wandered off.

When I come in most afternoons there are "porters" (read inmates) running around all over the place outside the fence. There are porters that work up front in the front desk/ admin building/ parking lot area cleaning offices and emptying trash and picking up trash and repainting the lines in the parking lot and there are porters that work down in the training building doing pretty much the same thing and there are porters that work with outside maintenance changing the lights on the perimeter and mowing the lawns. There are also numerous outside work crews that go out with the highway department and other people. There are also inmates that go out with the laundry truck drivers to pick up and deliver laundry from the places all over that we have bulk laundry contracts from.

For the most part, these inmates have shown that they are at least temporarily trustworthy and can do work outside the fence unsupervised. And many of them, for the most part, are unsupervised. We just do not have the staff to keep a physical eye on every single one of them every minute of the day.

Heck, we don't have enough resources to watch them 24-7 on the inside let alone outside.

So, on occasion, as you may guess, one of them does something stupid. Like today for example. One of the outside porters got on one of the little "gator" utv golfcart things and disappears for over an hour. I guess he couldn't come up with a good story about where he had been so now he's sitting in the dry cell waiting to see if he was trying to smuggle something in. Look back for a post about the dry cell for the whole process there. It's a load of laughs.

Is there a solution to this problem? Well, no. We can either hire staff to do the trash work outside that the inmates are doing (which isn't going to happen) or outfit them with high-tech tracking devices so we can keep track of them wherever they are (which isn't going to happen either) or just hope that nothing bad happens and keep going the way we are (which is probably going to happen).

All we can do is stay alert and keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. At least somebody noticed that this joker was missing.

And whether or not numbnuts manages to produce anything contraband-wise or not, I'm sure we will be having him down in the Hive for a good long time. And when he gets out he will have to find a job inside the fence from now on.

Job security.