shortly before I got to work yesterday, two of the inmates in my Unit got into a fight in their cell & one was hauled to the infirmary & one was taken to the Hole.
one of the first tasks of the evening was to seperate their property, stow it someplace, & Clean Up All The Blood.
("There was blood all over the place!" I was informed by an officer who was on duty, "One king Hell of a Scrap!")
entering the cell, however, the carnage turned out to be a dried splatter about the size of a dime.
(which is good, because, as you might expect, cleaning up a lot of blood is Not Fun)
also: cleanser on the floor, wet clothing shoved into the corner, a hell of a lot of property to sort out for two men in a tiny cell, & the steel in-cell toilet filled with soggy potato chips.
brief explanation: there was obviously a fight, but a fight means lots of Hole time, plus loss of priviledges, plus a change in classification (where you can be & who you can associate with)--so they cleaned it up themselves before they were hauled out of the cell (with the cleanser & the clothing) & tried to say it was a trip & fall. (anything incriminating went into the toilet with the potato chips, because who wants to dig thru a toilet full of potato chips? answer: there are a number of individuals on the staff who would, indeed, go thru a toilet full of potato chips, with CSI sugarplums dancing in their heads. thus: whatever needs to be flushed gets flushed. add potato chips & sundry nastiness. instant merriment.)
anyway, after each inmates property had been separated (most things an inmate owns either has his name on it or is set apart in the cell, as ten minutes notice to "roll yer shit up, yer being moved" is fairly commonplace--but there were a few items I & the officer doing the cell with me couldn't assign to either inmate A or B, so I was A, he was B, & we rock-paper-scissored for 'em. it may not be precisely fair, but it got the job done.) we stowed it in the hallway.
later in the night my senior officer went out to inventory all of it, & he found tattoo ink & maybe 3 or 4 hundred tattoo designs by inmate A.
(tattooing is Bad, in prison, for a couple of reasons: spread of various variations of Hepatitus & other blood-borne diseases, infection, & that they're generally gang-related & the more someone is inked the more they belong to the gang, body & soul, & the addiction to getting inked Outside is nothing compared to Inside where, for a lot of the guys, their body is their rep: a way of telling your story: what you've been thru, who you run with, what you've done & what yer capable of, in a way that no pussy little strand of barbed wire around yer forearm or dinky little chinese symbol on yer calf will ever do.)
anyway, the senior seperated the designs into what was gang symbolism (clowns, numbers, glyphs--he belonged to a mexican gang, many of which have incorporated Mayan symbols, or at least a sort of Reader's Digest version thereof) or showing firearms, or penetration (not for the faint-hearted).
mostly, tho, they were just naked ladies (of a fairly generic type--long, windswept hair, jutting breasts & prominent nipples, cold eyes, idealized bondage gear, long legs & stilletto heels)
that's one of the shitty things about this job: this sort of schizophrenic grasp of The Situation. part of me understands The Rules & the need for them, & part of me is thinking: Jesus, this dude has some real artistic potential, if he's a bit unimaginative ('course, you could say the same thing about Norman Rockwell--they both had a particular audience they were scrawling for)--there were designs that looked pretty much made-to-order & there were those that seemed where he was drawing on something deeper.
also: this was months of work & we just swooped in & took it. like that. because we can.
&: prison tattooing is traditional, innit?
ah well. anyway, I'll hopefully be quitting in a couple of months.
one of the first tasks of the evening was to seperate their property, stow it someplace, & Clean Up All The Blood.
("There was blood all over the place!" I was informed by an officer who was on duty, "One king Hell of a Scrap!")
entering the cell, however, the carnage turned out to be a dried splatter about the size of a dime.
(which is good, because, as you might expect, cleaning up a lot of blood is Not Fun)
also: cleanser on the floor, wet clothing shoved into the corner, a hell of a lot of property to sort out for two men in a tiny cell, & the steel in-cell toilet filled with soggy potato chips.
brief explanation: there was obviously a fight, but a fight means lots of Hole time, plus loss of priviledges, plus a change in classification (where you can be & who you can associate with)--so they cleaned it up themselves before they were hauled out of the cell (with the cleanser & the clothing) & tried to say it was a trip & fall. (anything incriminating went into the toilet with the potato chips, because who wants to dig thru a toilet full of potato chips? answer: there are a number of individuals on the staff who would, indeed, go thru a toilet full of potato chips, with CSI sugarplums dancing in their heads. thus: whatever needs to be flushed gets flushed. add potato chips & sundry nastiness. instant merriment.)
anyway, after each inmates property had been separated (most things an inmate owns either has his name on it or is set apart in the cell, as ten minutes notice to "roll yer shit up, yer being moved" is fairly commonplace--but there were a few items I & the officer doing the cell with me couldn't assign to either inmate A or B, so I was A, he was B, & we rock-paper-scissored for 'em. it may not be precisely fair, but it got the job done.) we stowed it in the hallway.
later in the night my senior officer went out to inventory all of it, & he found tattoo ink & maybe 3 or 4 hundred tattoo designs by inmate A.
(tattooing is Bad, in prison, for a couple of reasons: spread of various variations of Hepatitus & other blood-borne diseases, infection, & that they're generally gang-related & the more someone is inked the more they belong to the gang, body & soul, & the addiction to getting inked Outside is nothing compared to Inside where, for a lot of the guys, their body is their rep: a way of telling your story: what you've been thru, who you run with, what you've done & what yer capable of, in a way that no pussy little strand of barbed wire around yer forearm or dinky little chinese symbol on yer calf will ever do.)
anyway, the senior seperated the designs into what was gang symbolism (clowns, numbers, glyphs--he belonged to a mexican gang, many of which have incorporated Mayan symbols, or at least a sort of Reader's Digest version thereof) or showing firearms, or penetration (not for the faint-hearted).
mostly, tho, they were just naked ladies (of a fairly generic type--long, windswept hair, jutting breasts & prominent nipples, cold eyes, idealized bondage gear, long legs & stilletto heels)
that's one of the shitty things about this job: this sort of schizophrenic grasp of The Situation. part of me understands The Rules & the need for them, & part of me is thinking: Jesus, this dude has some real artistic potential, if he's a bit unimaginative ('course, you could say the same thing about Norman Rockwell--they both had a particular audience they were scrawling for)--there were designs that looked pretty much made-to-order & there were those that seemed where he was drawing on something deeper.
also: this was months of work & we just swooped in & took it. like that. because we can.
&: prison tattooing is traditional, innit?
ah well. anyway, I'll hopefully be quitting in a couple of months.
Its too bad you guys couldn't have taken the supplies and left the art...
I know about Nevada though. I stayed in northern Nevada for like two months a few years ago. There were two choices of occupation there. You could work at the brothel, or you could work in the silver mine. Or, if you didn't have a job, you spent all your time playing the slots at the 7-11.
But, damn, the desert was beautiful.