Today was pretty crappy, as I was the booking officer and we had about 9 bookings before noon. (Damn Sun) Luckily I had some stellar rovers (Bags and Bish) who were an immense help, so we knocked it out with only minor inconvenience.
Most of the bookings were what we call “commitments”. Commitments have already been sentenced, and typically they are only sentenced to 10 days or less. More often than not, commitments are only sentenced to 24 hours. These commitments get sentenced then ask the judge if they can report to jail at a later date so they can get some logistics worked out. If the judge is in a good mood, and they don’t have any reason to believe they won’t show up, he or she will allow it. We get about 5-10 of these every Saturday. We got 5 today.
Something else that happens every Saturday is what we call “Linens and Greens”. We change out half of the linens and clothes of the inmates in the jail; on Sunday we do the other half. Along with linens and greens, we also do “personal laundry”, which is exactly as it sounds. Most inmates come in with their own underwear and socks that we let them keep while they are in jail. If they want to, they can bag these up on Saturdays (and two other days throughout the week) and get them washed. It’s not fun, but it’s part of the job, and we always do it first thing in the morning so we don’t have it hanging over our heads all day. With the crew I’m with now, it goes pretty fast, which is nice.
At about 1pm, I went up to give a break to the control room officer. As soon as I sat down, I heard an inmate banging on a cell door, so I looked into our lockdown unit (the usual place to hear such noises). Inmate “Mady” (names have been changed to protect… me) was kicking and punching his door. His floor officer was in the unit talking to him, probably trying to de-escelate the situation. So I watched, and listened via the intercom.
Inmate Mady was having none of the officer. He kept kicking and banging, so the officer called for other officers to assist him. You see, we aren’t allowed to let inmates bang or kick or hit anything for very long. It’s very possible and likely that the inmate will hurt himself while doing so, and we are responsible for them. If it were up to me, I would let them bang until they broke a hand, then let them think about it in a cast for a couple of months, but seeing as we are charged with stopping bad stuff, not starting it, we aren’t allowed to do such things.
Officers understand the brief angry kick or frustrated punch. We know that at times an inmate just feels the need to do “something” to relieve the anger boiling inside. We don’t condone it, but we also know that brief instances DO happen. It’s the repeated, hard, potentially damaging aggression that we can’t allow to continue.
Well, officers arrived, and told the inmate to put his hands through the “cuff port”. A cuff port is a small opening in the door the inmate puts his hands through, so we don’t have to enter the cell and have a physical confrontation. It’s also good for other things…”the fogger”.
The fogger is a large can of OC spray. If you don’t know what OC is, think Pepper Spray times 10. It’s potent.
When inmate Mady refused to cuff up, we told him that we were going to fog him. He was warned many many times before the officer in charge directed the officer carrying the fogger to give him a 2 second burst.
Most handheld OC spray is the Stream type. It shoots out in a straight line. The fogger sprays a large amount of OC in a cone type.
The fogger was used, and the cuff port was closed. I told Mady, via the intercom, that as soon as he wanted to cuff up, we would open the port, and he could get out of the cell.
About 2 seconds later (literally) he was knocking on his door asking to be cuffed.
Now, there is a down side to using the fogger.
The entire jail smells like OC, and OC makes you sneeze and cough even in small amounts. It’s safe to say that the other inmates in the jail weren’t too thrilled that Mady needed to be fogged. If you can imagine the tickle in your throat that you get if you have a cold, that’s about the same as what smelling OC is like.
The nice thing about OC, is that from now on, Mady will do whatever is necessary to avoid having to get fogged anymore. It’s amazing, in a situation where OC use is threatened, the difference in action from an inmate who has been fogged before, and one who hasn’t.
The whole issue with Mady started because of personal laundry. Instead of giving his bag of personal laundry to the officer, Mady flung his onto a light hanging from the ceiling. He was told to cell in, and decided to get angry about it. All in all, pretty stupid, but that’s the job, and we do the best we can.
