An Endless Line Of Knuckleheads

Quick pre-note: I'm not trying in any way to imply that Tibetan monks are knuckleheads. It was just the best pic of an endless line I could find. No offense intended.

When I first walked in and saw Whompy walking out with the metal detector over his shoulder I should have known it was going to be one of those days. They only really break those things out when they expect to find something buried out on the yard.

Somebody said he was out hunting shanks. Somebody asked him how many he found and he held up five fingers.

Snap! If they found five, I wonder how many they didn't find? That's just one of those questions better left unasked. Not if you want to keep your paranoia reigned in, anyway.

Get down to the Hive and everybody there is soaking wet with sweat and about run into the ground. I don't know how many releases they did, but they had gotten thirteen lockups... just one right after another. And they got two more before shift change.

The Bear said at one point the property bags were piled about waist high in the office while everyone was concerned with just getting the offenders in their cells. The whole day was just an endless line of idiots getting locked up. (Hence the picture)

We got word of one more coming down from the treatment house right before count time. We assigned him a bed for when he arrived and it left us with one open bed in the entire house.

We finally caught a break about dinner time and things slowed down. After chow Chucky and I took out a round of rec and as we were bringing them back in we hear this garbled radio transmission. Someone sounding overly excited. All we hear was "garble garble nine! By the handball court!"

Oh snap. I knew what it was, even if I didn't catch all of it. Somebody was fighting.

Well, it takes two to fight and we only had one empty bed. Doesn't take a math genius to figure we were going to have to kick somebody out. Found the first name on the list and told him to pack up because he was leaving. Every dark cloud, right?

Mere moments later here comes the first fighter. Even before we knew his name. Even before we got the bed emptied out to put him in. So we had to put him on the restraint bench while we got the other dude out and chased him out of the house.

Luckily for us (but not the inmate) the second guy got pretty hurt and had to go to the hospital. They thought he might have broken his leg in the fight. At least it gave us a little breathing time before he showed up at our door.

This kind of crap always happens when it's miserable hot outside. I guess tempers just get short in the heat. Mine gets pretty short too, when I'm walking around getting screamed at with sweat running in my eyes in a constant stream.

If they knew how testy the heat made us down there they might think twice about doing something stupid enough to get locked up for.

But then, thinking twice isn't their strongest skill set.

Keeps us in business.