“The Best Psych Program in the State”

(Censored) County Jail, B-Unit – Spring 2013 – Day 5

No one is screaming, yet.

Someone at the far end of the unit has been cracking themselves up since breakfast was served six hours ago; their feral laughter ricocheting around the unit, reverberating off the steel and concrete – distorted, amplified, then muted – like the psychotic snickering of a desert djinn playing on a canyon breeze.

Less amused, and having grown tired of napping, I’m loitering at my cellfront, scrutinizing ‘the best psych program in the state.’ When you get bored enough you can take interest in anything. Even the mundane happenings of this mostly empty dayroom.

I’ve never seen a dayroom this large, or this underutilized. With room enough for a few hundred, it’s presently colonized by just four old men. These scraggy survivors all sit silently, self-isolating at different ends of the unit. Zero socialization. Watching TV, watching the wall, one reads the paper. The guard at the kiosk is reading a novel, legs crossed, shiny boots up on his many-buttoned control panel.

Scanning the interior of this man-made cavern, I see rows of darkened windows and the vague contours of depressed bodies sleeping their lives away. A few people pace the length of their cells. Directly across from me, an emaciated young woman with blond hair and pink highlights is staked out at her cellfront, like myself, spectating this procession of nothing.

The alarm on the cop’s watch meeps, and he tells the old men to go back to their cells. As soon as their doors shut, a barrage of whirs and clacks sound off from all corners of the unit. A large group, 15 or so ragamuffin misfits, filter out and scatter. Some break for the hot water faucet, filling cups with steaming hot water and prodigious heaps of instant coffee scooped from zip-lock bags, others race to snatch the scarce newspapers from tables and alcoves, a couple zip off to visit neighbors, all of them stealing a moment of leisure before getting corralled into the re-entry class.

This is the class Alex mentioned – the only class offered in this unit, and it has nothing to do with mental health. It’s restricted to inmates who are about to be released. It’s supposed to help teach people how to better access community resources, read the Yellow Pages, use public transit, etc. Classes like this are helpful for some people but they don’t have anything to do with asylum-level care.

The facilitator, a short, straight-backed old woman with neatly combed hair claps her hands a few times. At that signal, inmates begin to assemble in a pew-like arrangement of white, plastic lawn chairs, that are set up in one of the TV areas, directly in front of the kiosk.

It takes a few minutes for her to reign in her flock of outcasts and oddballs. Most of them die of boredom on impact. The others wither soon after, under the force of her droning voice.

I can’t make out what she’s saying from my vantage point, which is nice. I retreat from this dismal crap, eat a peanut butter sandwich, and start doing pushups.

Two hours later the class is dismissed. Some participants are so exhausted by the nothingness of the class that they seem eager to get back to the nothingness of their cells. I guarantee the only reason people sign up for this class is to get out of their cells for a few extra hours.

That’s it folks! That’s the extent of the treatment provided to mental patients in this here ‘best psych unit in the state’. We get pills, and a class which has nothing to do with mental health. And somewhere in the facility, there are rubber rooms (all jails have rubber rooms) but rubber rooms are not a form of treatment and are used mostly for the purpose of strong-arming people into taking pills. But most of us don’t get to go to the class and don’t spend much time in the rubber room, and a large proportion of us are not on pills. Which means many of us are not receiving ANY KIND OF MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT WATSOEVER. (If a mental patient isn’t receiving treatment, they aren’t a patient, they’re just mental. They’re just a crazy person in a box.) Furthermore, psych meds are dispensed along with other medications routinely in every housing unit in the jail, and in every jail. This means the treatment provided in this unit is no different than that provided in every other unit in every other jail in the country. The only thing that really makes B-Unit different from the other units in the jail is that we are on 23-hour lockdown… and that the jail reinforces this solitude by releasing us for our piddly 40 minutes of OCA in really small, segregated social groups.

After the pill nurse leaves, the guard lets out a small group for OCA… I was hoping it would be Alex’s group, so I could get him to bring me a newspaper, but it turns out to be a group of seriously disturbed female inmates. I try to flag down a big, freckly redheaded chick who has her shirt on backwards, so I can enroll her in the idea of bringing me a paper.

“Excuse me? Do you think…”

She rushes by briskly with her lighting-struck hair and spazz hands.

Over the course of the day I do more pushups and continue to keep a lookout for Alex but he’s a no show. The day passes, I surrender.

Three in the morning. I awake to the crackle of the intercom and a disembodied voice hailing me.

“O’Connor…”

“O’Connor…”

“Yes!”

“Do you want your OCA?”

“Yes.”

“Your door’s open.”

“Thank you,” I find myself saying to the dead intercom.

I drag myself out into the dayroom for the sole purpose of foraging a newspaper. I’m the only guy in my group who chose to come out at this hour. I wander the vacant ward, sleep drunk and hypnotized by the humming lights, searching for a newspaper or a bookshelf, but find nothing.

I lose hope after stumbling on a bread-crumb-like trail of newspaper shreds that leads to the aftermath of some poor bastard’s manic episode. In an out of the way TV alcove, which seems like it belongs in an airport, not a jail, the Sunday paper has been diligently butchered and flung about like confetti.

My sleepy, mournful eyes grope the carnage, alighting on meager fragments: “…Egyptian revolution…”, “…wild horses slaughtered…”, and in headline type “…VATICAN DENIES…”. These phrases embed in my tranced head like dream shrapnel. I skip the remainder of my precious OCA, stumble back to slumber, and find myself trapped in a slow, suspenseful nightmare wherein I have been blamed for the bloody slaying of wild horses and must evade angry Catholics, who intend to torture me into confession and burn me at the stake. All of this takes place as I wander an eerie, never-ending labyrinth version of B-Unit.

(Censored) County Jail – Spring 2013 – Day 6 – The Bullpen

I snap awake to the sound of my breakfast hitting the floor. Someone has shoved my lunch and breakfast tray through my tray slot without first waking me. The bag lunch is fine, but the tray clatters and launches cornmeal, canned pears, sausages, and cold toast all over the place. Prisoners never serve meals so disrespectfully. I look to see a guard at my door. He bangs on my window with his fist and says, “You’ve got court! Be ready in five!”

Jerry warned me about (censored) County before I got bussed down here last week. He said the sheriffs had no problem killing people; they had rooms without cameras set up out of the way where none of the free staff will hear you screaming.

“Jerry, that describes most jails,” I said, dismissively.

“Sure it does. But (censored) County is extra grimy. You’ll see. Just mind your manners and watch your back while you’re up there. Them boys’re ORGANIZED.”

He gave me this sinister little smirk when he said ORGANIZED, and left it at that. Like that one word explained everything.

Jerry ran out of gas with a dead body in the back of his truck about 16 years ago, out on a country road in (censored) County somewhere. First person to pull over and offer assistance was a cop. With no ID, no registration, and nowhere much to run off to, Jerry just said, “Hello” and told the cop he ran out of gas. When he couldn’t produce ID the officer claimed to have probably cause for a search and asked Jerry what he had in his truck.

“Some clothes, some tools, a corpse.”

I don’t know how the (censored) County sheriffs treated him or what he saw while he was in their jail, but I’ve been to plenty of jails and they are all full of guys who are under the impression that their particular county has sheriffs who are somehow uniquely corrupt and violent. So I chalked his warning up to bluster and had completely forgotten about it, until this morning.

The “bullpen” is where they put you when you have a court date. It’s a short term holding station hidden in the guts of the courthouse, out of public view. It functions much like a bus stop does. Sheriffs round up groups of prisoners from the jail, starting around six in the morning, and escort them to the courthouse, where they deposit them in the bullpen. From the bullpen, sheriffs then escort individuals back and forth between specific courtrooms, as the courts need them.

In (censored) County the bullpen consists of 10 or 12 holding tanks. They line both sides of a hall, facing each other so you can watch the men in the opposite cells wring their hands and pace impatiently (while you wring your hands and pace impatiently).

Bullpens tend to hum with emotion. Most guys sit and stew quietly while they wait for the judge to call their case number, but there will always be one or two who compulsively rattle on – bitching about public defenders, telling stories or jokes in an attempt to distract themselves, or desperately seeking legal advice from crack heads, winos, schizophrenics, and anyone else who is willing to offer a comforting opinion. Occasionally someone comes strutting back from court after beating a case or breaks down into a teary mess after being sentenced.

Today, court is uneventful, but the bullpen less so. For three hours I shiver in the early morning air of the holding tank, only to be whisked into court for five minutes, arraigned on charges of armed robbery, and sent back to the bullpen for a few more hours. When I return to the bullpen, an old, ruddy-faced wingnut with long, stringy, white hair and a mess of faded tattoos dripping down his sunburned hide is banging on the door of his tank, screaming at the injustice of cops throwing away his tent, bicycle, and his favorite sleeping bag, all on account of him being drunk. But he is also quoting scripture, making threats, praising celebrities, and bitching about the Vatican’s involvement in extraterrestrial politics.

He appears to be fresh off the streets, strung out, pissed off for good reasons, but also utterly delusional. This dude should be in a rubber room getting his brain soaked, not down here, pissing off a young clique of roided-out deputies – who all have suspiciously well shorn heads.

From the cracked door of their cramped observation booth, lined with closed circuit video monitors, the cops repeatedly yell at the old man to shut up. He persists.

A slim, narrow-eyed, young cop storms out of the office and up to the old guy’s tank.

“Your gonna shut the fuck up, NOW! You hear me?!”

“Suck my dick!” the geezer blasts back.

“You can shut the fuck up on your own,” the young cop growls, “or I can shut you up!” But the old man is already yelling over the guy.

“I put my wind in you. That’s what you’re gonna do! Fucking choke, asshole!” The guy has some kind of trip about “the wind”. He keeps saying he puts his wind into people. That the wind came from the pyramid and that the wind will bring him back after he dies.

The cop walks off, returning shortly thereafter with posse in tow. They walk from cell to cell, ordering everybody to go to the back wall and sit down. We do as we are told, eliminating our ability to act as eye witnesses. Jerry’s words suddenly echo in my head, “Them boys’re ORGANIZED.”

It’s not at all unusual for jail guards and prison guards to beat up crazy people just because they are unstable, but this pre-beating procedure is an unusually organized affair. As a general rule, guards don’t mind beating prisoners in front of other prisoners. Ordering us to look away is new to me. Feels like a modernity worth fearing.

Refusing to comply with this demand might be the moral course of action, but it’s also the irrational course of action. Defiance will not prevent the cops from beating this salty bastard; it will only earn me a beating of my own. This is a grounded, well-informed perspective, but it offers no comfort as I obediently avert my civil eyes, retreat to my safe corner, and hang my head. Worse than the sensation of powerlessness, I can’t escape feeling that I have participated in the violence.

The chirp of boots on polished cement floor, dull thuds, and the words, “Stop resisting!” barked out repeatedly, announce the physical confrontation. After a good three minutes they are still yelling for him to stop resisting.

“Fuck you! I’m not resisting! You worthless fuckers!”

“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” (More thuds and grunts)

“You stupid brain-dead shits! Why don’t you go fuck yourselves?”

At this point they’re beating him because he’s talking smack, and he’s talking smack because they’re beating him. There is no mystery in this, visually confirmed or not, everyone knows what’s happening. This old wino might be ornery, but he’s not Bruce Lee. He poses no threat to this squad of varsity thugs. So why yell, “Stop resisting”? The point is to justify continued application of force. Just like ordering us to the back of our cells, it reduces the chance of a law suit. Never confuse this seemingly irrational behavior for anything other than protocol.

They used to yell, ‘Get down!’ but that command has largely gone out of vogue. When someone is already face down on the ground, with five large men holding them down and beating them, repeatedly telling that person to ‘Get down!’ just makes you look dumb – and civilian bystanders easily grasp the disconnect between claim and reality. Nonetheless, that was standard practice for decades.

But now, thankfully, with the new and improved ‘Stop resisting!’ law enforcement professionals, near and far, can beat their arrestees in a dignified manner, without having to constantly bark out fantastically stupid orders that clearly can’t be followed. ‘Stop resisting!’ also comes with the benefit of increased unaccountability, because no matter how neutralized your perp might be, no matter how many cops are piled on top of them, if they are still alive, they could still be resisting – if only in spirit. No eyewitness can argue to the contrary.

Today our cantankerous spirit of resistance has emerged the champion, if only because he refused to shut up, cursing his assailants loudly and viciously even as they haul him off to the rubber room.

“That’s it!?! That’s all you got!?!” he taunts.

“Shut the fuck up!!!” the cop now sounds angry and foolish, powerless.

“Make me!! You pussys!!! You can’t!! The wind controls you now!!!”

From the anonymity of the tanks a voice well-practiced in antagonism calls out, “Ain’t that a bitch!? Y’all got that wind up in y’alls’ asses now!!”

Laughter emanates from the holding tanks.

“Should’a never fucked with that wind, piggy!”

The old man’s refusal to submit and the solidarity-snickering is a timeless response to brutality. Hide your pain, pretend you are fine, counter attack. The old man showed heart and made these cops look stupid, but after they leave him slumped naked in a rubber room, after they medicate the guy into a stupor, he will feel the violence all through his body for weeks, or months… and really, the body doesn’t heal well at that age, an old guy like that might feel some of those lumps and cracks for the rest of his life.

All of this is normal, run of the mill, jailhouse bullshit.

(Censored) County Jail, B-Unit – Spring 2013 – Day 7 – “Best Psych Program in the State”

I miss my OCA again. Another full 24-hours in the cell. The ward is quiet. I spend a few hours juggling empty milk cartons that I’ve been saving from breakfast. There has been no sign of an actual psychiatrist or psychologist since I arrived in B-Unit.

Dead of night. This dude who has been lying docile since I got to the jail has suddenly gone bonkers. He’s been laughing hysterically for the last six hours and finally his neighbor (the emaciated girl with the pink highlights) started kicking her door and screaming for him to “shut the fuck up!” The booming of the girl’s door has the ward all riled up and a chorus of door banging, screaming and laughter crashes in from all corners of the unit.

This got the cops up here with a psychologist. From the comments made by the cops it’s clear the guy has shredded a couple of books and smeared food, and maybe feces, all over his cell.

The doctor tries to talk to the guy, gets nowhere, gives up, and then gives the cops a head nod before walking away. The cops promptly crack the guy’s door, tackle him, and drag him off to the rubber room, where he will be placed under observation and medicated into obedience.

“Thank you!” the girl who was kicking her door hollers out, “I really appreciate that! Maybe next time you can haul his ass off like, I don’t know… FUCKING SIX HOURS EARLIER!”

A short, greasy sheriff sneers back at her, “You wanna go with him, BITCH?!”

“FUCK YOU!!!!!!” she roars.

They aren’t going to come get her though. Just some parting sentiments…

Once the goons leave, the floor cop cracks Alex’s door. Alex appears at his cellfront, in his underwear, rubbing his eyes.

“OCA?” he yells down to the kiosk.

“No. Cell #31 needs cleaning.”

Alex walks over to cell #31, takes one look at the mess, and lets out what can only be described as a sleepy “argh…” of sadness.

(Censored) County Jail, B-Unit – Spring 2013 – Day 12 – “Best Psych Program in the State”

Today was the first day I neither missed my OCA, nor received it in the dead of night. Which means I finally had an opportunity to meet my OCA group.

As soon as our doors popped, a scrawny blond-haired kid bolted for the payphones, cursed the automated service, mashed the keys, and proceeded to fidget and huff while waiting for the call to go through. Immediately thereafter, four well-weathered, probably homeless, probably schizophrenic and/or senile, old guys with beards emerged from their cells and went shuffling off, each to his own far corner of the dayroom.

I spent most of my time jogging, but also managed to fit in a fast shower and a visit to Alex’s cell. At 2:30 in the afternoon, he was deep in what appeared to be glorious sleep.

Now I am faced with 23 more hours of life in a box. At the prison where I was just housed I would usually run five miles and then play a full game of football or soccer, or do a full workout and then walk laps for the rest of the day. Compared to that kind of exertion, this little jog I went on today barely passes as a warm-up, and the cell workouts will only ward off the depression for so long. Eventually the lack of sunlight and limited movement will wear me down – as it will anyone placed in these conditions – but in my case it will result in more than just depression. When I get depressed I run the risk of becoming manic.

Mania is the opposite of depression. When you are manic you feel unjustifiably happy, confident, and thoughtful. For this reason mild manic states (also referred to as ‘hypomania’) are actually pretty useful and there are plenty of famous thinkers and artists throughout history whose achievements are attributable to manic episodes – often referred to by biographers as flights of creative passion or divine inspiration. More recent examples include Robin Williams, Hunter S Thompson, and Carrie Fisher. (And some believe JFK performed under pressure as well as he did because he had first faced the crucible of countervailing emotional forces imposed on him by a moderate bipolar disorder.)

If it were not for the depressive episodes that come along with mania and the fact that stronger states of mania induce delusion and total impairment, mania might not be considered a bad thing at all. Unfortunately many people who suffer from bipolar disorder are subjected to more pronounced manic states that reduce a person to a giggling, babbling, psychotic mess. Strong manic states can lead a person to jump off a building, thinking they are a superhero, or kill family members who are thought to be imposters, or worse. The depressive side of the condition has its obvious drawbacks. So psychiatrists tend to medicate the hell out of anyone who shows signs of bipolar disorder. But the mood stabilizers and antipsychotics they use to control mania tend to make a person feel depressed. To eliminate the depression, they then stack an antidepressant on top of whatever they gave you for the mania, and it can be very hard to find an ideal balance between the medications that renders the patient stable, but also not depressed. For this reason many bipolars who are lucky enough to have a moderate or mild form of the condition choose to go without medication. Accepting the curse of depression along with the gift of mild mania.

I am one of the ‘lucky’ few who can remain at a nice mild manic state, if I get a huge amount of exercise. Full bore physical exertion and lots of sunlight is really the only medication I have ever found that does not have unacceptable side effects. If I am deprived of this medicine I soon slump into the physical depression of lethargy, later becoming spaced out (but oddly euphoric and blissful), and then inevitably I slide into emotional depression. If I become depressed it’s only a matter of time before I start having manic swings that threaten to push me out of the nice, productive, creative space of mild mania, and into the spasticity of what psychiatrists would consider to be a legitimate, sleep-deprived, dangerous manic episode. When my moods get out of whack like this I also start to get hit by a kind of hypomania that features all the physical stimulation of mania, but in place of the positive emotions I get trapped in waves of anxiety and racing thoughts.

I have only rarely had manic episodes so severe that I start losing sleep, but if there is one thing that will always do this to me, it’s solitary confinement. Every time I come back from one of these crappy little 40-minute OAC periods, and see this kennel of a box waiting for me, I can feel a hypomanic anxiety attack lurking in the walls, like a big cat in the grass, patiently stalking me.

Right now it’s just watching, but in a few months, when my defenses are low, it will eat me alive.

To keep the tiger at bay I do a few hundred crunches, squats, and lunges.

(Censored) County Jail, B-Unit – Spring 2013 – Day 14 – “Best Psych Program in the State”

This is the first day I was lucky enough to get my OCA while the rec patio was getting direct sunshine. The light hurt my eyes, which have already acclimated to constant indoor lighting, but I forced myself to stay out on the patio for the full 40 minutes. Exposure to direct sunlight causes the human brain to produce serotonin. I’m not in a position to pass up any of that.

(Censored) County Jail, B-Unit – Spring 2013 – Day 15 – “Best Psych Program in the State”

A handful of the young Latinas are out on the rec patio, having their convict workout/girl time. A tall, attractive, immensely sad-faced girl with flowing black hair that hangs past her hips and a thousand-yard stare, is sitting cross-legged on the concrete, while her friend combs her hair and talks non-stop. Another pair is taking turns doing pushups, others slouch against the wall with a new, skinny, bucktoothed Black girl who they seem to already know, and to be happy to see.

Inside, the dayroom is empty, but for the sheriff at the kiosk.

When their OCA is over, they head back to their cells directly, making none of the detours to neighboring cellfronts that most other high-functioning inmates make. I realize for the first time that I have never seen any of the Latinas visit anyone’s cellfronts at all. Which makes me wonder…

… as if responding to my thoughts, four of them pass my cellfront; three march by, but the one who had been combing her friend’s hair while motor-mouthing makes shy eye contact with me for a moment, and looks back a second time, smiling sweetly.

“What the fuck was that?!” the Latinas’ apparent alpha snaps at the girl. “You flirting with the crazy guys now?!”

The other two explode with laughter.

“No… but, like, he don’t LOOK crazy,” she defends weakly.

“That muther fucker is a jaycat!⁵ Don’t ever let me catch you talking to any of these crazy dudes! You got that?”

Although most of the women in this unit are enrolled in the mental health program, this brief encounter (and especially the use of the word “jaycat”) tells me that this little posse of lady thugs is not part of the psych population. This means the jail uses the psych unit as overflow housing for female inmates when the normal GP women’s unit is at max capacity. Which sucks for the chicks that get stuck in here.

In the female GP unit these young women would be out of their cells most of the day, every day – same as the male GP inmates. But right now they are reluctantly slamming their doors and locking themselves in to another 23 hours of mind numbing solitude.

“Fucking pigs! I hope you all die!” one girl screams, as she slams her door. Her friends laugh at her outburst.

In particular my heart goes out to the tall, slender, heavy-eyed girl with the long hair. Solitude will do nothing good for this one. It’s plain to see she needs therapy, but even here, smack dab in the middle of ‘the best psych program in the state’, she goes unnoticed.

Then again, how could she be noticed, when there are no psychologists in here to take notice of her?

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