The Crunch Hits Home

The "downturn" in the economy has come home to roost in the Adseg unit. We've always had a budget and needed to stick to it. I don't know how much money we have to spend and I don't really care. It's not my job to watch the nickels and dimes. It's my job to watch the inmates.

But we have been running out of supplies at an alarming rate. It started out as little things. Now it's getting really inconvenient.

Being an Adseg unit and having some of the nasty loose in our house as we tend to, we are usually a little more hygiene conscious than most places. I wash my hands about ten times a day and use that hand sanitizer stuff in between and I go through maybe a dozen pair of latex gloves a day. It's necessary. The incidence of HIV and hepatitis and other potentially irritating diseases is alot higher in our house than anywhere else on camp.

We have been out of paper towels for over two weeks now. Not just us, the whole camp. There are a few places that have a carefully hoarded supply, but not many. My boss has paper towels in her bathroom. But her supply is running low, too. The Major has paper towels. The Warden has paper towels. They may be running out too. I don't know. I don't talk to those people unless I can't avoid it. We've been reduced to using old state issue t-shirts left over from the inmate laundry to dry our hands. And that's hardly sanitary. Our supply of liquid soap and hand sanitizer is running low as well. Soon we'll be forced to use the state issue soap which is about as useful as washing your hands with used linoleum.

And to top it all off, we heard the other day that our supply or latex gloves was rapidly running out. This is not good. Not good at all. What the hell are these people thinking? I'd like to stand up on my hind legs and make the state comptroller or whoever it is that controls the budget come down and see how many inmates he'll put his hands on with his bare skin. "You got any cuts or open sores or even torn cuticles on your hands? Any openings for infection? Well, this guy has got full-blown HIV and possibly scabies. And you have to strip search him and go through every piece of his clothing and property with your bare hands. Sucks to be you, buddy."

Between work and home, I tend to do alot of things with my hands and end up with alot of cuts and scrapes. I work alot with wood and metal and sharp objects and always have little cuts and nicks and dings on my hands. I try very hard not to catch anything. I even keep a bucket and some bleach handy for my boots when I come home. When we had babies in our house the little ones loved to play with daddys work boots. I made sure they were clean. And more than once I've come home and stripped off and thrown my uniform straight into the wash with extra soap and a touch of bleach when things got messy. I'm not bringing a case of the awful never get overs home.

If we run out of enough stuff then things are going to come to a sudden halt. This is not a threat or work stoppage, or anything. This is a statement of facts. And if they start running out of food they better spend some money on ammunition because things are going to get ugly.

Not My Job!

I'll admit that there have been occasions when I have wished violence to some of my charges. There have been times when it was a real good thing (for everyone involved) that there was a closed heavy steel door between us.


But I am neither an executioner nor a hospice worker. I am also not a nurse, nor a doctor, nor a licensed gerontologist. Yet it feels like I am being forced into one or more of those roles and I don't like it one bit.

There's this inmate. Let's call him "Buck". Buck is an older guy, but not all that much older. Mid-sixties, maybe. Down for the long count for some serious armed robbery type stuff. I'm pretty sure i posted about him before. He's fading fast with senile dementia and Alzheimer's. He's not all there any more. Doesn't know where he is half the time and doesn't care the other half. We sent him up to the "Hospital" some months ago and they said "Yep! He's got dementia and alzheimer's! Good luck, here ya go!" and sent him back. It seems they're not "set up" to take care of that kind of patient/inmate. WTF????

Well, it seems there was also something wrong with him physically so they sent him up to a regular hospital and rumor has it that they diagnosed him with terminal lung cancer. And they aren't "set up" to take care of alzheimer's patients either, so THEY sent him back. Huhhh??

A decision was made and he was to be kept up in our medical ward at the prison and they said we wouldn't be getting him back.

Today we got him back.

It seems medical is tired of dealing with him, since he both won't listen and can't hear and he lays around naked all the time and it embarrasses the nurses. Let me rephrase that. It embarrasses the nursing supervisors. The nurses themselves (most of them, anyway) are professionals and don't get rattled by something small like a naked man. They know he's a loony as a duffel bag full of caterpillars and they just do their jobs.

They knew that our assigned house nurse (who is a great guy and knows what we go through and stands up for us) and our boss were both going to be gone so they made the decision to send Buck back down to the Adseg unit.

Where we will probably get to watch him die live on camera.

I'm not happy about this.

Medical claims that the pshrinks say he's sane enough to return to general population. The pshrinks are all saying it's medical calling the shots and they wanted him to stay in medical. Sarge and I raised a stink higher up but nobody will make a decision either way. And neither our nurse or the boss are around to back us up.

Dammit.

Snap.

This is just B.S. and it's pissing me off all over again just trying to put it down into words. But I think it will help a little now that I've let it out.

Thanks for listening.

Watching The Detectives

Ok, there's "something going on" on our side of the camp. I mean, there's always something going on, it's a prison after all, but this is a little more serious than the usual goings-on. Some sort of gang related thing. Another realignment of the local power base. Happens all the time. Sometimes it's just a little push and shove and sometimes people start getting hurt. Fortunately for us, it's just been inmates getting hurt so far.

But some of our staff take an opportunity like this to try and break up the gangs and stop the violence before it gets started. It's a good thing, most of the time. If they don't get carried away. And it's occasionally fun to watch. A bunch of them will start snooping around like Junior G-Men speaking in codes and using their Marvel Detective spyglasses and searching everywhere for evidence of the gang activity.

I'm not putting them down. I'm not! Ok, I may be poking a bit of fun at them. And if I was out on the yard I might be doing the same thing. I've been known to ferret out the odd clue or two. And I'm pretty good at finding hiding places. We used to have a gung-ho captain at our camp that at the first gleam of gang activity he would swoop down on a yard with six or seven officers in tow and lock up fifteen or twenty people "under investigation" until one of them cracked and told him what he wanted to know. I kind of miss him. But he made life in the AdSeg hell on days he decided to do that. We'd never had enough beds to lock all of those inmates up at one time so we'd have to kick some out early.

Even though he's retired and gone, it still goes on. Luckily on a smaller scale. Just one or two at a time. There's enough going on that in the next two weeks I'll wager a good half of our house will be locked up "under investigation" for gang activity. They'll identify the ring leaders and transfer them to other camps and we'll get other gang memebers in trade from those other camps and it will start all over again....... ad nauseum.

Alot of the staff look at it like something to break up the routine and keep things interesting. But there are a few who take this sort of thing waaaaaayyyyy too seriously. Good gawd, you'd think they were IRS agents or those guards out front of Buckingham Palace that aren't allowed to smile or blink. Humourless lot. Me, if I can't find a joke in it somewhere, I'm not having a good time. I guess I'll just keep watching my little knuckleheads and leave the detective work to the professionals.

A Walk Down memory Lane

Nothing much happened today, so I thought I might relate a story that took place a few years ago. It's somewhat amusing in that sort of "Eeew! Get that thing away from me!" way.

We got an inmate locked up from the 120 day drug treatment program. Not a rare occurrence. We get these guys sometimes. The judge will tell them if they can get through 120 days of this program, they can get out on probation and not have to do however many years of prison they are sentenced to. Sometimes it works............ sometimes not. Sometimes these guys come in from county and they are still detoxing off of whatever it was they were high on. They don't tend to last long in the "program". This was one such gentleman. They locked him up for "creating a disturbance" or some such thing. We tend to call it "Being stupid in a No-Stupid zone."

When they sent the guy down to us, we could see he was a little........off. But he wasn't out of control or anything, so we put him in a regular cell with another inmate. No sooner had I got back into the office from this little errand than the phone rings. It's another C.O. from over at the treatment house. He says "Hey, you know that inmate we just locked up? Well, it turns out he's not completely housebroken. We just went to pack up his property and found out he's been shi**ing in his footlocker!" And then he says "He's all yours! Good luck!" and hangs up the phone.

Snap.

Not many minutes after that there is a kind of desperate kicking at a door over in D-wing. It's the other inmate we put that guy in with. He says "Man! You gotta get this guy out of here! he's crazy!!!" I look in and the guys sitting on the other inmates bunk with his pants down around his ankles with one hand down inside his boxers......... just busy as hell.

Sooooooooooo............ we get him up and get him redressed and cuffed up and take him over to C-wing to be in a cell by himself. That turned out to be a good thing and a bad thing. Being by himself, he couldn't hurt anybody else. But I think being by himself helped make him a little more full-goose bozo. He degenerated rapidly. He refused to take his meds. He'd throw his food on the floor and roll on it like a dog with a dead squirrel. He'd splash all the water out of his toilet onto the floor and swim around for hours. He was a regular Michael Phelps in 1/16th of an inch of water.

But the worst was the hollering. He would holler words and phrases over and over for hours and hours on end. He was so crazy it was driving the crazy people crazy. His two favorite things were water and meds.

"WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER!"
"MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS!"
And occasionally he'd throw in the odd
"CHICKEN SANDWICH!"
And then back to
"WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER! WATER!"
"MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS! MEDS!"
And once in awhile
"SAINT LOUIS!!!!"
For freaking hours and hours on end.

For days.

He rarely slept. And neither did anyone else in the wing, I'm told. Even our craziest wobblyheadest knuckleheads that we were thinking of naming C-wing cells after were begging me to get out of the wing. "Please, C.O., please! Move me out of here and I'll become a priest and I'll dedicate my life to the poor and I'll never do anything wrong again! Just get me out of this freaking wing away from that nutcase!"

Some parts of it were kind of funny at the time. I know the man had some serious mental problems but Gawd! If we could have harnessed that it would have been the greatest reform tool ever invented for the penal system.

I hear he's doing much better now. He walks around the yard down in wobblehead land talking into his invisible cell phone by the hour. He cuts big money deals with all of the power brokers and spends alot of time on the phone with the white house. But he's behaving so we don't see him anymore.

To this day, tho, every time I hear someone say "chicken sandwich" I get the giggles.

Hee hee hee.......

Always A Bridesmaid, Never A Bride

There was another movement team today, with the new shock shield.

Trouble was..... it was in another house. That sucked. Didn't even get to see anything.

We always know when they are putting a team together. They always call the same people. Sometimes it's just nonsense, but if we hear someone called to relieve certain people from their posts, then we know it's a team happening. You can almost feel it in the air.

But usually, the team is coming to our house. I can't remember the last time there was a movement team somewhere else. I was all confused. kept looking around in all the wings for a problem that didn't exist. Not in our house, at any rate.

Turns out it was way over on the other side of the camp in the house where some of our emotionally challenged offenders are kept. I say some because alot of them live in my house a good part of every year. I know almost all of them by name. And they all know me. Occasionally I have to run down by there for something and they always get nervous seeing me loose on the yard. I get alot of "What the hell are you doing down here???"

Oh, and I say emotionally challenged because I got seriously frowned at by the head Pshrink lady for saying the forbidden word "wobbleheads". She frowns at me alot. I think the woman may have some unresolved issues.

So anyway this aforementioned knucklehead went totally crackers and started running around threatening everybody in his wing saying he had a knife and he'd kill anyone who came near him. They managed to get everyone else locked down in their cells and had him contained in the wing until the team could get there. Turns out he didn't really have a knife, he was threatening people with an ink pen. But it's hard to tell sometimes. And he put up a hell of a fight, from what I'm told. Assaulted two of the team members who came in to get him and was still struggling after getting hit with the stun shield twice. That's either real strong, or real crazy. Or possibly both.

We missed seeing all of that, tho. We were just waiting with bated breath for the team to show up with our latest contestant. But by the time they got him all the way across the camp to our house there was no fight left in him. At least they loaded him on a cart and drove rather than carry him the whole way. Everybody would have been worn out by then, I'm sure. But they just carried him in and put him in the cell and stripped him out and shut the door. Pretty much an anticlimax after all that buildup. As one of our officers said "Sometimes the foreplay is better than the act itself." That was pretty much it.

I remember about three years ago when they started offering classes in movement teams again and I got picked to go. I was so excited. The class was fun. I knew being on a team wasn't going to be fun but I looked forward to the opportunity to be on one. But it turns out that since I'm already assigned to the Adseg unit they won't put me on a team unless they have no choice. They seem to believe that since I will be dealing with the offender after the team, that I may either A: Harbor a grudge against the offender and try to "get back" at him or B: He may harbor a grudge against me for being on the team and use anything I do in the Adseg unit as "retribution" and file a lawsuit against me and/or the state. Whatever. Do you really think that anything that happens on a movement team is going to be worse than the things I have already gone through just being in that house? Pfagh! I say again Whatever!

What the hey. I'd actually rather just watch, anyway. Don't have to do any paperwork that way. They got two computers up in the office and there's usually at least seven people trying to do the paperwork at them. They should let me bring in my laptop. I'll do my report down at the house and just send it up on a floppy and they can print it out up there. They'll be writing and rewriting those reports for a week.

Didn't wanna be on their old movement team anyway!

Self Harm?

An interesting topic came up in conversation today. We were wondering about the psychological effect of working around so many disturbed people for such a long period of time. I wonder if they had taken a psychological profile of me five years ago what would be different now.

I know I'm a bit more outspoken. I used to be rather introverted except around close friends. Now I'm more likely to tell a total stranger to go blow it out his smoke hole if he's bothering me. I've done it a few times and it's always startled me.

I'm more likely to invade someones personal space to gain an advantage. I was never really very "touchy-feely" with other people before. I'm not all that now. But I know now it sometimes knocks people a step back when you invade their space and it can give you just enough edge to sometime defuse a situation.

I never really was a violent person before. Sure, I've been in my share of scraps, but only if I couldn't avoid them. Now I'll dive into a fray without thinking much about it and grab body parts and twist them around until somebody squeaks. I'll think about it afterward and say to myself "What were you thinking?" My thoughts before were always "Somebody might get hurt." And now it's "Better him than me."

I've noticed my speech patterns have changed. I used to swear alot. I still do sometimes. But nowhere near as much as I used to. Especially at home and out in public. Out here I just say "snap" alot. People make fun of me for saying that. I guess it's from hearing so much profanity at work I don't feel the need to use it so much myself.

I can no longer stand to be crowded. People walking behind me make me skittish. Going into Walmart when it's busy can be a trying time. I'll usually just leave and come back later.

Are we doing ourselves harm by working down there for so long? I still feel like the same person. But if I was wearing a tinfoil hat and hiding baloney in my socks I probably wouldn't feel any different inside my head. I still think I'm a fairly nice guy, all in all.

But coming up behind me suddenly for any reason is not a good idea. If I know who and where you are, I'm okay with it. But if you catch me off guard, things might get messy.

Oog

Daughter and I stayed up to watch the ball drop and then toddled off to bed. That was the latest I had stayed up in a long time. Intentionally, anyway. There have been a few sleepless nights when I was technically awake and not happy about it. Good damn thing I didn't have to get up and work this morning. That would have been bad news for someone, I'm sure.

I guess my mental state shows on my face too well. When I'm having a really bad day, ninety nine percent of the offenders suddenly get real quiet and polite. That last one percent usually end up having a worse day than I am. I try really hard not to let my personal and professional life cross over each other but I'm only human. Or at least from humanoid stock. Sometimes I can't help it. It would make me schizo to try and keep the two completely separate. Or more schizo that I already am, anyway. I think you gotta be a little crazy to do this. And actually, we discovered a new catch phrase: "You don't have to be crazy to work here. We'll train you!"

So Happy New Year to all and to all a good morning. I'm off to do the honey do's that I do so well. (grin)