Chapter 1 of 4
Welcome to (censored) County
(Censored) County Jail – Spring 2013 – Day of Arrival
In the movies, booking is always full of large muscular toughs, and a hooker who is, traditionally, ‘talking smack’. As I survey this real life booking area through the graffitied Plexiglas of this drunk tank, a comparatively dismal scene presents itself. Someone’s grandma is cuffed to a bench in a charming, baby-blue nightgown, looking like she’s off her meds, her trembling hand, raised hesitantly for the attention of passing officers – unanimously ignored. The only tattooed, muscle-bound stereotype down here at the moment is crying. There does happen to be one curvaceous, scantily-clad, young woman yammering into a payphone with great hostility, but she’s not a hooker.
“Just three days?! JUST three days?! My fucking midterm is TOMORROW!!! … God damn it Dad, I’ll pay the sorry-ass traffic tickets, just please pay my bail already!!!”
A handful of deputies are stationed at a row of computer consoles, dispassionately processing the less fortunate – like checkout clerks at a grocery store monotonously typing, scanning, swiping. A kid with pierced, jeweled face and oversized pot leaf on his shirt bites his nails as he answers the questions a chubby young deputy is reading from a questionnaire. A couple of elderly street-folk vacantly go through the motions – answer questions, be polite to the nurse, try to press your palm on the glass in just the right way, so your fingerprints transfer the first time and the walking heart attack of a cop that’s processing you doesn’t get frustrated with the crappy technology, and with you… go get your crusty, sad, bearded face photographed, chin up, hold still, that’s right, good job, now sit back down and wait…
… keep waiting.
Across the way I can see bleary-eyed strangers glowering from the windows of another drunk tank. (They appear to be drunks.)
Then there’s me, sitting on this frigid steel bench, alone in this forty-man drunk tank, waiting for the psychologist to come interview me, so I can get admitted to one of the jail’s subterranean psychwards. Actually, three of the jail’s four stories are hidden underground, leaving but a single drab, slate façade, glum in the sun; the tip of society’s unwanted iceberg parked in a quaint residential panorama; a monument to our willful self-delusion and unspoken … ; a tomb for the living.
But the city’s streets are well populated with cranksters and winos, which kinda screws the rational for hiding the jail below ground.
I try to decipher the words of the incarcerated masses, as they have been crudely engraved on the walls and windows of the drunk tank – the only discernible messages seem to be ‘FUCK THE PIGS’, ‘911 was a hoax’, and ‘fuck…’. The ‘fuck’ was scratched into the paint of the wall, then someone else came along with a blue, ballpoint pen and punctuated the ‘fuck’ with three trailing periods. This feels like the true, underlying message. Not ‘FUCK THE PIGS!’, just ‘fuck…’.
Pondering the unhappiness of the freshly apprehended bastards before me, I am reminded of how bad it feels on that first day of arrest. In sharp contrast, I have just been extradited from the relative comfort of a small ghetto in the desert – known commonly as a prison. After six years behind bars, sitting in this drunk tank for a few hours is a non-issue. If anything, I wish I was back in prison, but only kind of. Down there I have a jade colored prayer rug (that I use as a yoga mat, not for prayer), and a cheap, but treasured AM/FM radio. The only thing you could say I’m actually worried about is Daryl – the senile cellmate I just left to fend for himself at the prison. I am accustomed to looking after him, and already wonder how he’s doing. But these are minor concerns compared to the passions these other fuckers are facing.
Tap, tap, tap…
I look over to see a tall, red-haired, pencil of a man, standing outside the drunk tank in a stiff white collar, tapping his clipboard on the window.
“Are you, uh, Kelton O’Connor?” he asks, making an effort to wipe the tired off his face.
“Yes.”
“My name is Jeremy. I’m a psychologist here at the jail. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Sure.”
“How long have you been in treatment?”
“Five years. But shouldn’t you already know that kind of basic crap… didn’t they send my file with me when I was transferred down here?”
He smiles unhappily. “It would be nice if it worked like that, wouldn’t it? But no, they did not. Do you know what level of care you were receiving?”
“I’m classified as EOP.” (A medium level of care.)
His forehead furrows, he says, “Hmmm…” while rescanning his clipboard.
Jailhouse psych programs are always having to turn people away, for lack of funding and beds. This guy’s purpose in screening me right now is not just to determine if I need mental health care, it’s to determine if I need it badly enough to warrant giving it to me. His thoughtful “Hmmm…” was him registering that I have been in a high enough level of treatment, for long enough, that he can’t rightly turn me away without violating what is referred to in the medical trade as ‘continuity of care’.
“How do you feel?”
“Tired.”
“When you say you feel tired, do you mean you feel depressed?”
“Yeah, I feel like shit.” I’m just tired, but if this guy needs to hear this in order to justify the continuation of my status as a mental patient, so be it.
“I’m going to have you admitted to the jail’s psych program.” He gives me a fake, but courteous, therapeutic smile. “We’ll take good care of you here. (Censored) County has the best psychiatric program in the state.”
This could be true and still mean nothing because our state’s jails, our nation’s jails for that matter, have set such a deplorable standard.
“Thank you,“ I say.
Exhaustion returns to the man’s face as he walks away. This was the quickest, sloppiest intake screening I’ve ever been through. Hands down.
The only reason I was just interviewed in this way is because I arrived from a prison where I was already receiving treatment. Everyone else that gets booked into the jail today will simply be asked by a nurse if they are on medication, and if they feel suicidal. Unless they look really unstable, the standard protocol is just to throw everyone in with the general jailhouse population and see who can hang and who can’t. If someone starts to get beaten up a lot for acting crazy, or tries to commit suicide, then they will be interviewed by an actual psychologist.
I watch the psych walk past the old woman on the bench, and everyone else, on his way out of booking, then I spend the next eight hours sleeping uncomfortably on the metal bench, using a roll of toilet paper as a pillow. Around 7:00 that night, a young, clean-cut sheriff keys the door to the drunk tank.
“O’Connor?” he asks, while checking to see if the face in the mug shot he’s holding matches mine.
“Yeah, I’m O’Connor.”
He hands me some khaki jail-duds and a bed roll, and wordlessly escorts me to an elevator. We descend two stories below ground, stepping out into a bright, white corridor that’s big enough you could drive a delivery truck through it. As we pass by shatterproof glass doorways on either side of the hall, I catch glimpses of cellblock interiors. In each, men can be seen in dayrooms1 conducting typical jailhouse lifestyles – playing cards, watching TV, doing pushups, etc. I’ve spent plenty of time in general population units like these. Depending on the jail in question, a general population inmate can expect to get anywhere from two to twelve hours a day in the dayroom. This golden resource is usually referred to as recreation time, or ‘rec time’.
The cellblocks in this jail appear to hold a hundred inmates each. But when we stop at a door, beside which “B-UNIT” is painted in four-foot-tall, orange letters, I peer inside and see a dayroom more than twice as large but devoid of humans.
The electronic lock on the door buzzes, the deputy yanks it open, I step over the threshold onto cheap, crater-speckled-grey, mat carpet, and immediately wonder how many tax dollars were wasted on this uncalled for ergonometry. (Fucking carpet in a jail?)
The door closes behind me and I realize the deputy is not following me. I am alone in a dimly lit, two-tier cellblock. Aside from the stainless steel picnic tables bolted to the floor, the stupid gray carpet, the polished oak celldoors that line the walls, and the large plasma screen TVs, everything in the unit has been painted beige and cream.
In the center of the room sits a raised kiosk which should be manned by the deputy in charge of this cellblock, but it’s currently empty.
Of the 20-something cellfronts in my line of sight, all have their lights off but one. A scruffy, pale, overweight kid stares at me from this cellfront. I look over at him. He flicks his light off but continues to stand there in the dark, watching me.
From the far end of the cavernous unit a yowling, swearing, laughing clamor is punctuated by the Bang!... Bang!... Bang! of someone kicking their celldoor. The lazy tempo probably means they have been at it for a while, stubbornly persevering, but have finally begun to tire.
A short, potbellied kid wearing county blues and flip-flops comes sauntering around the corner.
“Oh, hey! There you are!” He struts up, smiles at me confidently with startlingly close together eyes and unibrow, thrusts his hand out for an orthodox handshake, and says, “My name’s Alex. I’m the porter.”2
“Nice to meet you Alex. I’m Kelton.”
“Your cell is up here. Come on.”
Alex leads me up a flight of stairs to the upper tier, past 40-some cells, to cell #79. The door is open, the light is on, and both bunks are empty. I toss my bedroll onto the cot. Alex fidgets at the door.
“How long can I expect to go for in this unit before I get a celly?” I ask.
“No. You won’t get a cellmate. Everyone in B-Unit is single celled.”
“That’s nice.” And unusual.
“Yeah. SUPER nice. So what are you here for?”
“I held up a bank, allegedly.”
“No shit! That’s cool!”
“Well, not as cool as you might think.”
“Right(?)” He feigns casual comprehension, but is plainly confused by the suggestion that robbing banks is, in some way, not cool. “Um, I’m supposed to give this to you.” He produces a Snickers bar from his back pocket. “They give us candy bars every Friday, for passing inspection, and we passed today. I was going to keep yours,” he says with a nose-wiggle smirk that emphasizes the zany closeness of his eyes, tragically. “But you seem like an alright guy. So… here.” He holds out the candy bar in a hand heavily marked by adolescent self-mutilation and botched tattoo attempts. A pot leaf and a knife? Maybe?
“Thanks. So how much rec time do we get in this unit?”
“You start off with 40-minutes a day, but if you’re good you can get promoted to 55-minutes a day. And they don’t call it ‘rec time’ here. It’s called OCA. That stands for ‘Out of Cell Activity’.”
A voice intrudes from somewhere down in the dayroom
“Wrap it up guys!” Apparently the B-Unit cop is back.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Alex says.
“Nice to meet you man.”
Alex scrams. I shut my door, which locks automatically.
If ever there was a first world jail cell, this is it. It’s clean and climate controlled for room temperature, the floor is smooth-polished concrete, which is customary, but where there would usually be a Spartan, stainless steel toilet without seat or cover, this cell boasts a normal, porcelain toilet with plastic seat, AND seat cover. This is unheard of in the institutional world. There is also a light switch on the wall, next to a small intercom panel. Most jail cells now provide inmates with the ability to turn their lights on and off at will, but most jails still don’t have intercoms. And those that do are sometimes sabotaged by guards, who can’t stand anything that enables inmates to better voice their needs.
All of this is cute, and I’m sure that my ass cheeks will, in the wee hours, occasionally feel grateful for a toilet seat that’s not freezing cold, but 23 hours of confinement a day is still 23 hours of confinement a day – no matter how nice the fucking toilet is. And 40-minutes of rec time – or “OCA”, or whatever the hell they call it here – is less than the one hour minimum permitted to state prisoners who are held in solitary conferment units. (The one hour which is, supposedly, a constitutionally protected right of all prisoners.) The one hour psychologists have repeatedly declared inhumane and insufficient to maintain mental and emotional health.3
I go to sleep hoping the psychologist in booking was correct when he said the jail’s mental health program is the best in the state. If it involves group therapy or self-help classes, I will at least be able to get out of the cell for more than the length of a crappy corporate lunch break.
(Censored) County Jail – Spring 2013 – Day 2
It’s strange to wake up in a cell all alone, after you’ve been living with someone who is facing terminal illness.
For the last eight months I would wake up in the morning to the sound of Daryl Boyd snoring. If I didn’t hear him snoring I would strain my ears for the subtle wheezing sounds that would let me know he was still alive. If I couldn’t hear anything I would eventually feel compelled to peer over the edge of my bunk, look down at the gnarled, grey-haired, old convict and wait for some sort of indication that he was just playing old guy possum, not slowly getting cold and stiff – a twitch of the whiskers, a shallow heave of the chest, or one of those sad moans that often escaped his haunted body as it slept. Any sign of life and I could relax, roll over, strap on my head phones, tune into NPR, and saturate my sleepy head with liberal reportage.
Not today. Today I’ve got no radio, no NPR, and no crazy Daryl to keep me company.
Daryl got struck out in the 90’s for stealing a $26 bottle of perfume while he was homeless, strung out, and broke. He was sentenced to serve the remainder of his life in prison – no chance of parole.
Now, 20 years later, Daryl has missed the funerals of his parents, his son, and all the friends who stayed in touch with him over the course of the decades since his arrest. He’s got dementia, two bad kidneys, two bum knees, degenerative disc disease, a spine full of titanium “instrumentation”, and a couple of tumors which may or may not be benign. The methadone the state pays for doesn’t come close to killing the bite and roar that lives in his bones, but he doesn’t complain much. This, among other things, makes him a good cellmate.
Last night I dreamt I had broken out of this little jailhouse and gone back down to the prison to make sure he was doing OK on his own. I got caught cutting a hole in the prison’s perimeter fence. I told the guards I was fine with them arresting me; all I really wanted was to know how Daryl was doing. But they wouldn’t tell me.
That was the end of the dream.
I am awakened at 5:00 in the morning by the rattle of an approaching breakfast cart. Momentarily disoriented, I lean over to look at the other bunk to check on Daryl. No Daryl. Just bunk.
We get “cell-fed” here… meaning our trays are brought to our cells. This sucks. Like most prisoners who are subject to intensive confinement, I cherish any opportunity to walk to a chow hall, barter food items among tablemates, and start the day by stepping out of the cell.
As the tray cart rattles closer I stumble to the door, catch my tray and bag lunch as they slide through the slot in my door, drop it all on the heavy, metal desk welded to the wall, and fall back to the bosom of slumber.
9:00 in the morning. Sleep fades to a mess of banging and screaming; the familiar sounds of a jailhouse psych-ward.
“Shut the fuck up, you stupid piece of shit!” a shrill, female voice rings out.
BAM! BAM! BAM! Someone kicks their door in response.
“GODDAMNIT, ANDY! SHUT! THE FUCK! UP!”
BAM!... BAM!BAM!BAM!BAM!
“Why smoke it and waste it when you can slam it and taste it?!?!” a gravely old woman’s voice cackles.
“Who’s kicking their door?” someone asks in a level-headed tone of voice.
“ANDY is! Don’t you pay attention to ANYTHING? GOD!”
Most jails do not house men and women in the same unit. Asylums sometimes do, and this jail seems to have adopted just such a policy here in its psychiatric cellblock. I immediately feel ambivalent about the prospect of co-ed social opportunities under these circumstances.
I rouse myself, drink water, and do yoga. My fancy, tempered glass window permits an ample view of the day room. Upstairs a row of showers lines a wall. Below that, pay phones stand at attention. To the left, the deputy lounges at his podium, the picnic tables await purpose, and almost out of sight, I can see a glass wall reaching all the way to the unit’s 30 foot ceiling, through which can be seen a small, concrete, open-air recreation patio.
The floor of the patio looks up at walls that reach past the vault of B-Unit, all the way to the roof of the jail’s ground floor. Basically, it’s a 30-foot long slab of lime and dust at the bottom of a 50-foot pit. The scraggles of direct sun, which do fleetingly caress the floor of this cage once a day, must pierce the rusted grate, chain link, and thin mesh that hang over the pit like a lid on a jar.
The patio is presently empty but for two Latinas who can’t be more than 18 years of age. The one who is confident, muscular, and pretty in a butch sort of way, is patiently teaching her intensely attractive, nervous, and tragically un-coordinated friend the basics of fist fighting. Shuffle, jab, shuffle. Shuffle, jab, shuffle. Good job. Now do it again… again… use your shoulders. Do it again.
Another couple of young Latinas sit at one of the TVs downstairs, watching cartoons, eating a bag of Cheetos, and laughing fitfully. But all of this comes to an abrupt halt.
“Lock it up!” the guard yells. “OCA is over!”
The young women drag it out, but within minutes they finish their hugs and farewells, and return to their cells for another 23 hours of solitude.
When the girls’ cell doors are closed and locked, the guard pushes a button on his control panel and a new group of prisoners is released. This group consists of five or six scruffy old guys, who all avoid each other’s company and wander off to read newspapers or watch TV on their own.
Every 40 minutes the prisoners in the day room are told to go back into their cells and a new group is let out. Men and women are not allowed out of their cells at the same time, but co-eds who are not drugged into a stupor do appear to spend a lot of their OCA chatting at one another’s cell fronts.
Around noon Alex comes by my cellfront on his OCA.
“SO, what kind of groups and classes do they offer here?” I ask.
“What kind of classes do you want?”
“I don’t care what kind. Just are there ANY?”
“There’s one. But it sucks, and it’s only for people who are getting released within a few months.”
“What about AA or church?”
“They have all that stuff, but we don’t get to go to it. Only GP4 inmates are allowed to do that stuff.”
“DO we get out of our cells for anything other than OCA?”
“Not really. If you have money to spend you can get out to buy stuff. But that’s just a few minutes, once a week.”
“Okay. I get the picture.”
“My OCA’s almost over. I’ve got to go jump in the shower. If you want to come by my cell on your OCA, my cell number is 35.”
“Thanks.”
“See ya.”
… Somehow I miss my OCA?
I spend the rest of the day doing a cell routine. I do a thousand pushups, jog in place, pace for a few hours, and generally tune out the echoing chaos of the asylum.
The sun tracks across the sky, the day passes, this artificially-lighted subterranea buzzes along, untouched by the natural cycles. I lay in bed, awash in the distillation of today’s thoughts. The memory of Taon Nguyen is suddenly storming my meditation.
Taon was one of my first cellmates. I had the privilege of living with this small, stern, Vietnamese man for two months in 1999, when we shared a clean, well-lit cell, in another modern-style jail house, not unlike the one I’m in right now. It was my first substantial jail sentence. I was 18, serving ten months for a drunken altercation with a cop, and hating every moment of it. Taon was a forgotten man, on Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) hold. He had no sentence, no release date, no real chance of getting out, and seemed to be taking it pretty well. If not altogether happy, he was at least well composed, grounded, and fully determined in his efforts to stay sane, decent, and spiritual. I never heard him complain about a single thing.
Knowing this man, seeing how he carried himself in the face of total oblivion, learning his story… it all affected me deeply. Though I have told his story only on the rarest of occasions, it’s now clear that I must commit to the page. And, I’m terrified to say, it may end up being the beginning of a book.
Taon was born in Vietnam during that little “conflict” we got involved in back in the Sixties. His father fought in the South Vietnamese army (alongside the US forces, against the communist North Vietnamese forces). When the US pulled out of the war, the North swept through the country, executing and imprisoning anyone who had fought against them. Taon was seven years old when the soldiers dragged him into the streets and forced him to watch as his father was beaten, made to get on his knees, and then shot in the back of the head without ceremony.
Taon, his brother, his two sisters, and his mother were thrown in a work camp where they worked constantly and slept in an open pit in the jungle floor, along with other starving women and children. People would often die of starvation, disease, swamp rot, or snake bite – their bodies spoiling in the pits next to the living.
The camp fed little more than a bowl of rice a day. Sometimes the soldiers threw the rice into the pits, laughing as the prisoners snatched desperately at the showers of grain.
To survive prisoners would eat grubs and other insects, occasionally a snake, if they could catch one. Taon and his brother were good at foraging and worked hard to gather sustenance for their mother and sisters, but one day the soldiers took their sisters away and their mother began to give her rice to the boys, refusing the food her sons tried to force on her. She wasted away, fell ill, and died.
Soon after this happened, Taon and his brother managed to escape, along with some other prisoners. To avoid being re-captured they hiked through the most dangerous and difficult regions of the jungle. Barefoot and entirely un-equipped, Taon and his brother survived hundreds of miles of steep ground, thick jungle, and tropical swamp, watching as others gave in to the elements, exhaustion, and fever.
When Taon first told me about this part of his story he didn’t go into much detail, saying only that he and his brother had been lucky, that “a lot of other people did not survive the jungle.” Out of fascination and stupidity, I pressed for the details of how the jungle had killed people.
Taon shrugged and said, “The jungle is dangerous, it’s full of disease and wild animals,” looking at me like I was stupid.
“People got eaten by animals?” I said with big eyes.
“Yes,” Taon replied, and then looked at me like I was more stupid than he had first assumed.
“Well… what kind of animals?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“At night we hear a woman screaming and some animals. In the morning there is just blood. Nothing else. We never see the animals.”
He was obviously irritated by my fascination with exactly what kind of animals had eaten the woman. Then he added, “This kind of thing is terrifying when you are a child.” The gravity of that comment sobered me and I felt guilty for pressing him.
Seeing my regret he continued, “That only happened once. Mostly people just got sick or gave up.”
The jungle Taon hiked through at the age of nine is called the Bo La Jungle. And though I seem to remember that fine, after 14 years I can no longer recall which country it was that they got to when they finally emerged from the wilds. It may have been Cambodia, but it’s not that important because they immediately stole a boat and sailed to Thailand, where they wound up in a refugee camp.
In the camp, Taon was separated from his brother. He never told me what happened. There was clearly a lot of pain in the memory.
Stripped of his last family member, Taon soon ended up in an orphanage where he learned a smattering of English before being shipped off to a place he described as ‘an island’ where he stayed briefly, before finally getting sent to San Jose, California, where he was placed with a foster family.
When Taon was thrust into the public school system he was still speaking poor English. His work suffered, to put it mildly. When he tried to talk to the White kids they made fun of how he spoke. He quickly fell in with a group of Vietnamese kids who, like him, had been rescued from refugee camps and transplanted into ‘average’ American families. Families who probably meant well, but also, undoubtedly, had little or no idea of how to even begin to build trust or connect with children who had been through that kind of insanity.
Unfortunately, this group of young, alienated, refugee camp survivors where Taon, and so many others like him, finally found a sense of family, was a Vietnamese street gang.
When I met Taon he had already served out his criminal sentence. He had done two years in San Quentin for possession of cocaine, but because he had never actually received full citizenship, the prison released him into the custody of the INS – who told him he was being deported, back to Vietnam. He was to wait for deportation in county jail. But Vietnam refuses to receive deportees, so he was actually being sent to jail in California, very possibly for the rest of his life.
To clarify – because I was baffled when I first encountered this mean little truth – when our country decides to deport someone back to a country that will not accept deportees, that someone ends up sitting in jail until said country changes its policy. In many cases such policy change will only come with revolution, a change of guard, or a change of core governing philosophies. In most cases, the non-citizen in question nuts-up long before any of that happens, often becoming suicidal.
To understand why people facing the situation Taon found himself in tend to go crazy and commit suicide more regularly than other prisoners who face life in prison, you need only notice that they are not in prison, and then investigate the differences between prison and jail. Academically speaking, I learned about these dissimilarities at the age of ten, when I mistakenly referred to my father as being in ‘jail’.
“Your dad is in PRISON, honey, not jail,” my mother said.
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s sorta hard to explain. But jail is worse than prison.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard to understand if you’ve never been locked up. And I hope you never find out for yourself. Just trust me, jail is worse than prison.”
“But WHY? What’s the difference?”
“Okay… to begin with jails are small. They are just for holding people when they have been arrested, but haven’t been sentenced yet. So the people in them are usually pissed off and stressed out, or coming down off drugs. Nobody has really adjusted to the idea that they are going to be behind bars yet. You sit in jail when you are going through your trial, or for sentences for petty crimes that are less than a year in length. Prison is where you go if you have been convicted of a felony, and are going to be locked up for more than a year. Prison is set up so you create a little bit of a life for yourself. You’ve got more time out of your cell, you can play sports, take classes, or get a job – and if you find a cellmate you get along with, the guards will let you guys live together. But in jail you get moved around all the time. New arrests come in constantly and the guards will throw just about anyone together. They don’t care if you get along. It’s really just a compact, short-term storage facility. Jail and prison are both horrible, but jail is really horrible. Your father and I were lucky. Our lawyer was good. He got us a decent plea deal quickly, and we got shipped off to prison fast, and didn’t have to wait in jail for more than five or six months.”
Now that I’ve been to jail and prison I can say for sure Mom was right, jail is worse than prison. And any veteran convict can tell you that.
When I met Taon he was five years into his slow march toward some lonely rubber room in the distance. Five years into his sentence of life in JAIL, condemned not because of crimes or some righteousness persecuted, or any other sort of ethical calculus whatsoever. Five years a man filed and forgotten… a man who, according to official record, was simply on hold.
When you are on INS hold and there is no country willing to recognize your citizenship, the state shuffles you around to different jails constantly. From what I understand there are private jails that will bid on INS holds in order to keep their beds filled. (Empty beds don’t generate revenue or draw tax dollars.)
I asked Taon to tell me about the other jails he had been to. Which ones? How many? What they were like? He told me some interesting (and scary) stories. But he seemed to be unclear on exactly how many jails he had been shipped to over the course of the five years he had been on hold. But there was one thing he could count on. No matter which jail he was in, he could count on the INS to run him through a shoddy court process once every six months.
Early one morning they would cuff him, shackle him, load him on a bus with an assortment of other ‘un-American’ souls, drive him out to the nearest INS court, and have him stand in line with said ‘un-Americans’, while a judge takes roll call, rattles off a bunch of jargon, and then dismisses them. At which point, translators would go around to each prisoner and explain, in simple terms, that the forms they were being handed declared only that absolutely nothing had happened, and everybody was still on INS hold.
This was the single shred of certainty left in Taon’s world. The only thing he could count on. And each time he was trucked out to this “court”, Taon would, in perfectly enunciated English he had polished just for this task, politely but persistently ask to be housed in prison, not jail.
His argument? That prisons are built for long-term habitation and jails are not.
Taon was not seeking a preferable lifestyle, he was pleading for a semblance of humanity. He was begging to be thrown into a dirty, rough, dangerous, state prison in order to get out of a clean, well lit, soul-crushing, modern jail almost identical to the one I’m in right now. If a disciplined, extremely grounded, patient man like Taon, who has lived through the hell of a communist concentration camp, considers the harsh realities of state prison to be so tangibly superior to the jailhouse life that he studies the English language to near perfection in hopes of someday successfully pleading his case, the differences are probably not trivial.
I said he never complained, but I did once ask him what he would do if he was never extradited to Vietnam, or transferred to a prison.
“If I continue like this, it will destroy me. No one can live their life like this.”
He pointed to a Cambodian man on the rec patio who I had never heard speak, who meditated almost all day, every day, and performed a lot of slow martial arts exercise.
“That man is famous among INS holds. He is known throughout the state for having survived on INS hold longer than anyone has ever been on INS hold. He has been on hold for 12 years and has been to almost every jail in the state of California, and he has not yet lost his mind. I am very disciplined, but not like him. If I stay for that long, I will go crazy. There is so much pain in my heart. I will kill myself.”
Not long after this conversation I was moved to another housing unit within the jail. I never saw Taon again, and I have no idea what became of him, but his words have remained with me. And now, laying here in this bunk, the memory of this old friend is suddenly so distinct I can practically see him hover over me like a disapproving Asian ghost. And I know what he would say: “You think you have an idea for a book. Write the fucking book. No excuses. No laziness. Work hard!”
(Censored) County Jail – Spring 2013 – Day 3
The unit has individual shower stalls, with wooden doors. The upstairs row is but a few yards down the way from my cell. I have already noticed that a number of guys stand at their cellfronts all day watching the showers. Waiting for the rare instance when a lady inmate might step out of a shower stall before she is fully dressed, or maybe return to her cell in a partly wet T-shirt. Though I have not been with a woman for over five years, and though I am a typically shallow heterosexual male, this kind of awkward Peeping Tom behavior doesn’t turn me on. Plus, it seems an expensive time commitment. Nonetheless, I can’t write a book without paper and ink, so I take up a station at my cellfront hoping to panhandle some writing materials from a passerby, and find myself soliciting a strikingly attractive, petite, young Black woman, who is returning from her shower.
“Excuse me; I’m trying to get a pen and some paper. Is there any way you can help me?”
The gently curved young woman stops in front of my door, but says nothing. As I wait for a response she looks me over with thoughtful, almond eyes, while drying her mocha hair. I would say something more, but I’m suddenly consumed with the task of pretending I’m not aware that her nipples are showing through her threadbare, white V-neck. I just stand there feeling a nervousness I have not felt since high school. I grip my poker face, while she treats me like a manikin in a shopping display, before turning and walking on.
I take a deep breath and vow not to jack off until I have gotten the thought of this exquisite young mental patient out of my head. In fact, I have vowed not to fantasize about any of the crazy chicks I meet in this unit over the course of my stay, even though some of them will inevitably flash their breasts at me and offer kinky encounters of one kind or another. This makes me something of a disgrace in the eyes of incarcerated men the world over, but I have my reasons.
A few minutes later I am doing a great job of lying to myself; forcing on myself the notion that I am more frustrated with the young woman for not bringing me pens and paper than I am frustrated with her for being so desirable. Then she comes jogging back down the tier, still in her thin, form-fitting shirt, ruining my life with her now bouncing, undeniably perfect breasts.
I notice the pad of paper and pack of fresh ballpoint pens in her hands only after she has come to a heavy-breathing stop at my door and thrust them into my line of vision.
“How much do you need?” she asks.
“Of what?”
“Pens and paper?”
“Oh…”
“Are you writing letters… drawing pictures… what?” she demands.
“I’m writing a book.” I am ambushed by how absurd I feel saying this out loud.
“Oh, you’ll need more than this.”
She takes her offering and strikes back down the tier, disappearing around a corner, reappearing a moment later, running with an armful of stationary. Only now do I realize she is not wearing shoes. This jail is so well kept that it’s not unsanitary to go barefoot, but it’s still unusual jailhouse behavior.
“Here,” she says, thrusting four pads of paper and two fresh packs of ballpoint pens underneath my door.
“Thank you. You’re wonderful.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Jesus.”
“Thank you Jesus,” I say. In response, she looks at me with approval.
“I’m June.”
“I’m Kelton.”
(Censored) County Jail – Spring 2013 – Day 4
No visits today. The solitude is heavy. I am once again wondering how Daryl is getting along and, of course, if he is still alive.
I had a few days’ notice before they transported me up here from prison. In those couple of days I packed my things and handed them over to custody, I wrote letters informing friends and family of my change in address, and I sat down with Daryl for one last interview – one more batch of notes, one more tale for the road, in case we never saw each other again.
He said he hoped he wouldn’t get transferred to another prison before I returned, even though he’s not up for transfer. It may have been his way of addressing the very real possibility that he might die before I return, without saying it outright.
We agreed we would cell-up again if I got back before he got ’transferred’, then proceeded as though it was a final farewell.
I had interviewed him before, taking notes on his life story, but this time I asked him what he wanted to say. I asked him to search for the most valuable insight he could offer the world, from his particular vantage point as a prisoner.
He sat for a minute, and then told me a story about Betty, a woman he loved very much. But I assure you, as he assured me, this story isn’t actually about Betty.
In the words of Daryl Boyd:
Betty was a tiny thing, five-foot on the dot, a hundred pounds, tops. She had a modest look, short hair, dressed conservative, perfect image of the domestic life, but she swore like a coal miner and kept a small caliber pistol in her back pocket at all times – you know, one of those cute little guns they make for women’s purses.
We called each other friends, but it was more than that. And sometimes we were lovers, but it was more than that too. For a little while we were livin’ together down in Los Angeles. That was back in ’83.
We had a trailer parked in a yard on the corner of Vermont and Torrance Boulevard. One morning we were getting ready to drive out to Vegas for a weekend – I was checkin’ this white Oldsmobile we had – changed the oil and had’er running out on the corner. Betty was inside selling this shifty neighbor of ours a bag of dope. Tommy Lee was his name.
Tommy was a nervous type, and an odd-ball, but no one had ever known him to be violent.
We found out, years later, that he had been awake for weeks. He was in the heat of a profound paranoia. But there’s really no excuse for what he did.
When Betty reached for her wallet to make change for Tommy, he got the idea she was reaching for that little gun of hers. So he whisked this long, curved fishing knife out of his jacket sleeve and plunged it into her chest, burying it to the hilt.
It wasn’t a robbery. The fucker left the money and the drugs, taking only what he had paid for.
I heard the door slam and looked up to see Tommy beatin’ boots down the street like the coward he was. Betty was stumbling down the steps of our trailer with that ugly thing stickin’ outta her.
She took a few steps toward me before falling down on all fours. I saw a small blotch of blood on the back of her cotton shirt, and a little glint where the tip of the knife had come out the other side of her.
I wanted to chase Tommy down and kill him just as desperately as I wanted to save Betty, but all I managed to do was stand there with my jaw hangin’.
Betty begged me, “Pull this thing outta me Daryl. It’s hurtin’ me something awful.”
“No,” I said, not wanting to speed the loss of blood by removing the weapon. Before I could explain my refusal, she called me a pussy and did it herself. She just sat up on her knees, griped the knife with both her small hands, and promptly wrenched it from her body.
Instantly blood gushed from her. In a blink it was all over her brown pants, white shirt, the silver and turquoise bracelet she would never take off because a medicine man had given it to her.
I’d never seen someone bleed like that. I was horrified. For a brief moment I just stood there in a trance, but when I snapped out of it I started movin’ fast as hell. The car was already running and it just so happened that little spot we were livin’ at was no more than two blocks from Harbor General.
While I was carrying Betty to the car I felt her die. She was already unconscious but all of a sudden she got more limp, then I felt her pants get wet and smelled her shit. She was gone.
I got her to the ER inside of two minutes, ran in with her in my arms. There was a surgeon standing right there. He asked, “How long has she been like this?”
I said, “Maybe three minutes”
He pointed to a room and said, “Put her down on the table there.”
By the time I had set her down, the surgeon was giving orders to nurses who were rushing for tools and bottles. No one said anything to me; I just stood off to the side and watched the whole thing. They cut her clothes off, wiped her down with iodine, made an incision from her clavicle to just above her belly button, cracked her sternum with a chisel and mallet, and inserted ’spreaders’. Spreaders are big, scary, medieval lookin’ pieces of machinery designed for prying open a person’s ribcage in a controlled manner – peeling them open far enough for three or four pairs of hands to reach in and work on your lungs or heart, but not so far that your ribcage just splits in two. When they got these big things stuck into her, they cranked her open in one ugly heave. It sounded like someone had stepped on a big pile of pistachio shells.
The surgeon reached in and gave her heart a gentle squeeze. Blood squirted through a small cut in her aorta. She was lucky the knife had only nicked her heart.
He stitched the cut with one swift suture, brought out a pair of miniature defibrillator paddles made specifically for use on infants, and placed them directly on her bare naked heart. One shot of current and Betty’s heart began to beat.
By that time the nurses had suctioned off all the excess blood. The surgeon checked for more leaks, told another surgeon to close her up, and walked out of the room. That’s when a nurse noticed me and chased me off.
Later the surgeon called me in to speak with him. He asked if I was Betty’s friend. I lied and said I was her husband, knowing this would afford me greater access to medical information.
He emptied the contents of Betty’s pants onto a metal table. There was $360 in a wallet, a quarter ounce of speed, and a small gun. He picked up the baggie of white powder and asked, “What is this?”
“Methamphetamine,” I said.
He told me, “It’s probably what saved her.”
“No, Doc,” I said. “You’re what saved her.”
He tossed the dope back on the table and calmly asked me to get it ‘the fuck’ out of his hospital.
I thanked him for saving Betty’s life, gathered her things, and high tailed it.
I walked out of that hospital carrying an enormous amount of respect for two things: that surgeon, and the practice of medicine.
For a long time after that I had something akin to a religious reverence for doctors, and especially for surgeons, but not anymore. Twenty years of prison health care destroyed every last bit of it. I despise the medical profession. I’ll never trust a doctor again.
When Daryl finished telling this story he asked me to go ahead and explain to you how his years in prison transmuted his reverence for the practice of medicine into such a pure-grained contempt.
Having already interviewed him on these points I’m well positioned to do just that.
Daryl Boyd versus Prison Health Care: A Saga of Sabotage
Daryl is almost entirely confined to his wheelchair, though he doesn’t like to acknowledge it. Sometimes he’ll walk a lap or two around the yard – wincing as he leans on his wheelchair, pushing it in front of him. This is all he can manage. There is no joy in this exercise and no chance of him getting fit from it, but he continues to do it. Probably just to prove to himself that he still can.
The truly debilitating problems reside in his hips and back, but we’re going to start with his knees. Daryl used to have a good knee and a bad knee. He went in for an operation which was supposed to fix his bad knee, and woke up with bandages on his good knee. The surgeon had operated on the wrong knee. Somehow the operation messed it up, so now Daryl has two bad knees.
As soon as he awoke, Daryl pointed out the mistake. The surgeon apologized to him and promised to call Daryl back in as soon as possible, but never did.
When Daryl sent medical request forms explaining his predicament and asking for the operation he had been promised, Medical would tell him he had already received the operation, belligerently ignoring all comments about the operation having been botched. All his formal complaints were ignored. Eventually he gave up.
This bum knee incident hints at, or suggests, there may be a culture within the prison medical system which is prejudicial, or at least indifferent. But indifference is often a symptom of prejudice.
The second chapter of our little saga more than hints or suggests. It illustrates clearly a rancid sort of prejudice and exposes how free this prejudice is to act within these walls when it so desires.
Sudden withdrawal from methadone is more harsh than sudden withdrawal from heroine. Neither junkies nor doctors dispute this. It is a medical fact.
It’s unethical for a doctor to pull a patient off of methadone cold turkey. They are supposed to taper the dosage down over the course of weeks, or even months, so their patients don’t go into convulsions, or die.
The epidemic of drug addiction that plagues our prisons is a wildly out of control problem which needs to be addressed, but discontinuing pain pill prescriptions as a disciplinary action is both inhumane and ineffective. Unfortunately some doctors seem to take certain issues personally and have, upon occasion, punished whole populations of handicapped inmates by depriving them of pain killers.
Punishing an entire group for the crimes of an individual is an old military strategy. It’s supposed to get the group to police itself or, in other words, beat the snot out of the individual whose actions caused the group punishment.
Needless to say, this is hardly something a doctor should be involved in.
Daryl was in administrative segregation (the hole) at Delano when a pissed off doctor decided to pull all pain management from the entire administrative segregation cell block. Guys had been caught hoarding their meds, but Daryl wasn’t among them. Nonetheless, he was disciplined.
At this time, Daryl was recovering from a brutal operation in which his bottom four vertebrae had been bolted together and fused into one big spinal chunk. Many doctors think this procedure should be outlawed. It’s only used in extreme situations when the cartilage discs in the patient’s spine have disintegrated to the point where the vertebral bones are grinding against each other. This advanced stage of degenerative disc disease renders its victim unable to walk. The fusing of the spinal bones into one piece prevents them from grinding against one another. The drawback is that the patient will never be able to stretch the muscles in his lower back properly again. Even when fully recovered from the procedure Daryl remains on pain pills for the rest of his life.
It was months before Daryl could stand up, much less walk. He was still recovering when the doctor pulled his entire pain management program. He had been receiving 60 milligrams (mg) of methadone daily, 900 mg of gaba penten three times daily, and 100 mg of tramadol three times daily.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with these drugs, allow me to assure you this is strong shit and lots of it. When it stopped coming Daryl was confronted with the nightmare of his sabotaged body un-medicated, as well as the savagery of methadone withdrawal.
Knowing the severity of Daryl’s condition, one of the guys who had been hoarding pills and still had a stash, gave Daryl 160 muscle relaxers. Daryl ate a few and discovered they were of absolutely no use as pain killers, so he downed the remaining 150-something pills, hoping he would die.
He doesn’t remember crawling under his bunk and pissing himself but the guards said he had laid there for three days before they realized he was actually having some kind of problem. They thought he was pretending to have lost his mind. This is something prisoners sometimes do in an attempt to get moved to a psychiatric unit. (Prison psych units are much more accommodating than normal prison conditions.)
When they finally pulled him out from under his bunk he was babbling incoherently. He fought the guards, got beaten badly, spent a month in a coma but woke up, and has managed to survive another three years of his sabotaged life.