On The Outside, Looking In

I loath to admit it, but I'm beginning to really enjoy my Wednesdays in the comm room.

For one thing, I'm outside. Not outside outside, like out in the fresh air. Except for my two hours in the P-car, anyway.

I'm outside the fence. And unless some snaphead tries to climb the fence, whatever goes on in there doesn't really affect me. Much, anyway.

And after listening to all the radio traffic inside I was pretty happy I was outside today.

First off, there was a Code 16 (medical emergency) on one of the yards. The offender was dizzy and couldn't walk. No big deal. They took him to medical.

Not long afterwards they said his blood pressure was way low and he was going to have to go to the hospital to get checked out. So they called an ambulance to take him there. Again, no real big deal.

While they were trying to load the ambulance a fight broke out on the yard. They ended up pepper spraying both offenders and at least one other staff (Lt Farmer) before they could break the fight up.

From what I heard, so many inmates clustered up around the fight that the Captain said "Oh frack this. Close the yards!"

So we got the ambulance out and the yards closed down for the night. While all of that was going on they did a cell search in 7 house and found a metal shank in one of the cells. Locked up two for that. One knucklehead in 8 house got mouthy about the yard being closed and he got locked up.

Earlier when I switched out in the P-car with Brother D he told me "Don't use up too much gas. We're out of fuel." We have our own fuel tank on premises but apparently nobody came to fill it back up so we have no gas. Nice. And we sent a chase car out to the hospital behind the ambulance with a quarter tank of fuel.

Not too much later the hospital called and said the inmates kidneys might be failing and they were going to have to send him to another hospital all the way across the state. So Ms Odd had to take another car to the gas station and fill it up with the state credit card and switch out with the guys over there.

In between it seemed like there was a steady stream of them going down to the Hive. I lost count after awhile. Maybe ten altogether, it seemed like.

In the meantime I was pretty content to spend a day in the air conditioning and not running back and forth like a maniac. That felt good.

Hopefully they got it all out of their system today.

Thursday will be National Nude Day. Oh....... Snap. Let's hope that doesn't get around. Keep it to yourselves, okay?

Who Is Listening?

The other night I had a whim. I wondered..... just how many other people are out there writing about working in a prison? Surely there has to be others.

So I went to my Yahoo page and put in "Prison Blog" in my search box.

Yahoo returned me 67,900,000 results.

So I set to scrolling through a few pages of those results. Now and then I would click on a page and look..... then go back to my search and scroll some more.

After 25 or so pages I gave up in disgust.

There were lots of prison blogs.... written by inmates. I read quotes from Lil Wayne, Paris Hilton and David Berkowitz, the infamous "Son of Sam" killer. They weren't actually blogging from prison. They were sending out letters and friends and family and sympathetic supporters were posting them in the internet.

There were lots of support blogs. "Free So and So!" and "Reform Now!". All written by either ex-inmates or friends and family of inmates decrying the "deplorable conditions" and the "physical and psychological torture" and the "inhuman suffering".

Of course there's little mention of what So and So did to get into prison in the first place. No entries about the shattered lives and broken homes and possibly even mangled corpses left behind for the rest of us to deal with while this "poor man" suffers in the hell that is prison.

When I read that someone referred to Berkowitz as a "reformed man" and a "true born again christian" I wanted to retch. I wonder how his victims feel about him?

I suspect that if I were a religious person before I read that statement, I wouldn't be afterwards.

But anyway, I digress.

I refined my search and put in "Corrections Officer Blog".

That netted me nineteen results.

None of which were me, by the way.

Most of them were from "Organizations" like the CPOA, which is, I'm sure, a fine organization if you happen to live in California. But none of them lead to actual blogs supposedly written by corrections officers.

So where are our voices? I know you people know how to talk. I listen to you every night. Some of you talk nonstop!

Why are we letting the inmates get all the air time?

Sorry. It was a long hot busy night down in the Hive. No real excitement, just work and almost unbearable heat and very little relief. It was a heat index of around 114 degrees today.

Right now, even after a cool shower and a big glass of ice water, I feel like a baked potato that has been left in the oven too long. Nothing more than a dried out husk.

Guess I'll quit being such a crabass and go to bed.

Tomorrow will be National Pecan Pie Day. Not a real huge fan, but I'd eat some. And that appears to be all she wrote for the holidays tomorrow. Simple. I like that.

Hawtness

This is what we carry at work. 3.1oz Top Cop pepper spray. It's a 10% OC solution that measures out at around 2 million scoville units.

To read about scoville heat units, go here.

The new Top Cop Mark 5 which will be available (hopefully to us) soon, will measure out at 5.3 million scovilles.

Some pretty hot stuff.

They just came up with a new pepper that they say is the hottest in the world. In Australia someone has cross-bred peppers and come up with one called the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. It rates at about 1.46 million scovilles.

You have to wear gloves when handling the peppers or your hands will burn for two days and you have to wear a respirator when cooking with the raw peppers to protect your lungs.

I imagine if we distilled those bad boys down and put them in a spray form we could get some serious crowd control going on.

I've had quite a bit of this Top Cop stuff on me and it's not very pleasant. It will burn your bits and if you leave it on your skin too long it will blister you. You can live with it on you, but it makes things like going to the bathroom quite inconvenient and uncomfortable.

We're about due to get some new stuff any time now. It's only good for about three years then we have to replace it and usually we end up getting something different every time. Hopefully we will get the Mark 5 cans.

Yeah. Show me your attitude. I'll show you my pepper spray. We'll see who wins.

Thursday is National Pecan Day. It is also International Moment Of Laughter Day. Let's see.... what could we do funny with pecans to make this work?