TheTreichels.com » A little hobby of mine

New Inmate, Old Inmate

Sunday, Jul 6, 2008 – 3am

A couple of days ago was my first day back on Swing shift, or “swings” as shift workers call them. It was nice, but I was the control room officer, so I had it pretty good. The other officers didn’t have it too bad either, since it was a fairly smooth night. At least it was until I got my skittles.

I love Skittles. I, at one time, owned a 3 pound bag of them, and they didn’t last quite as long as they should have. Well, my wife brought me dinner along with a small bag of skittles in honor of my first day of swings, and I made quick work of the bag, only handing out a few skittles to my fellow officers.

About an hour after my skittles fix, I started feeling them, and not in the good “wow, what a great sugar high” way, but the “uh oh, I think I’m gonna need a break to expel these” kind. I had to take about 3 extra breaks in order to purge my bowels of this candied delight. On one of these quick breaks I went down to the booking area. Mistake.

There was an inmate in booking that was just brought in. He was pretty obviously drunk, and didn’t mind letting everyone know about it. He also wasn’t happy, crying in fact, and let that feeling freely flow as well.

The booking officer was trying to get him to take off his piercings; he had quite a few. An eyebrow ring was causing him some particular trouble, so he decided that instead of unscrewing the end of the ring, he would just pull it hard… through his eyebrow.

Well, in keeping with our whole, “We can’t let inmates hurt themselves” motto, we stopped him from fully realizing his wishes, but not before he caused quite a bit of blood to flow from his newly minted tear.

Officers were on hand to keep his hands from his face, since he kept trying to yank on the ring. I came around the counter with my pliers, and when he saw me he started crying again, talking about how expensive the rings were. I sort of felt bad, but not bad enough to not cut the rings out of his bloody head. If we had let him, he would have yanked them all out, causing a great deal of blood and pain. Neither of which I like to see.

He ended up sobering up a bit after the whole ordeal, and even went to sleep a short time later. I managed to finish my original business, and sauntered back to the control room to sit out the rest of my shift. It was interesting to be back on Swings. I always forget that that weird stuff always seems to happen then.

Take tonight, for instance. I was the rover tonight. We had a couple of bookings early on, and after that there was 4 hours or so of pretty much nothing. It was nice. I commented to a fellow officer about the niceness of our situation, when suddenly we were knee deep in bookings.

I will keep my mouth shut next time.

Out of the bookings we had, 3 were suicidal, and one was a long-time recitivist. (is recitivist even a word?) Anyway, he has been to jail far more times than I can count on both hands. Tonight he was finally caught in some bushes after a lengthy foot chase.

It seems that this inmate, I’ll call him Lee, was trying to burgle some houses and got caught.

The funny, or sad (depending on how you look at it), thing is that Lee was having a pity party tonight. He complained of rib fractures, and of leg breaks, and of head-aches, and a “need to be taken to the hospital NOW”. According to him, he was beaten, and jumped on, and poor poor Lee was just misunderstood, because according to him, he had been told that those houses were OK to go into. He couldn’t tell anyone WHO told him that, but just that he had been told.

Our medical staff looked him over thoroughly and deemed him fit for jail. The exam took a little longer than it should have since Lee was fairly foul mouthed with everyone in near proximity. If he could see you, then you were a “Mother Fu****”. (In his defense though, I am married to a woman who is a mother of two. So, technically…)

Anyway, unfortunately for Lee, he also had some Meth on him, and when he ran from the officers, he didn’t exactly give up at the first available opportunity. You would think that someone who has been caught as many times as Lee has would know when to say when. If I was as bad at being an officer as he is at being a felon, I would be fired by now.

I have some rules I will follow if I ever decide to become felonious. Maybe I will write these down for Lee.

1. Don’t run from the cops unless, you know the particular cop chasing you:

a. has no radio.

b. is fat and out of shape.

c. doesn’t have a K-9 dog with him.

2. In the event that I don’t follow rule #1, I will:

a. not fight when I am caught.

b. not have drugs on me, or near me, or around me, or IN me.

c. run like I’m being chased by something worse than what is actually chasing me.

3. In the event I am caught, I will exercise my right to remain silent.

Of course, most of the population, like me wouldn’t BE felonious in the first place, but in the event of a moral slip, I think the above rules might come in handy. Just a thought.

E-Mail this article to someone. Comments (0)

Fog

Saturday, Jun 28, 2008 – 10pm

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.

E-Mail this article to someone. Comments (0)

Reno and Costa Rica

Thursday, Jun 12, 2008 – 12am

So, when I wrote the last post I was suddenly stricken with an erie feeling that I was perhaps a little boring.

Then, out of nowhere I got a call from a friend asking if I wanted to fly to Reno for the day. Adventure, here I come!

At about 9pm, we flew out of PDX on a trip to pick up a car that was “too good a deal to pass up”, and it really was. The car was a replacement for a recently deceased subaru that was sputtered it’s life out in some horrible death throes. New car time for them, free Reno trip time for me.

Aaron, the now proud new owner of an Equinox, needed someone to accompany him to pick up the car, so that he:

Wasn’t alone.
Wasn’t mugged (alone).
Didn’t fall asleep at the wheel on his way home.
Wouldn’t get more physically ill than he already is. (trust me, you don’t want to know… ps. it’s not an STD)
???????? ????? ????????Wouldn’t worry his wife.

Any of the aforementioned reasons are completely plausible, and probably equally important, but I was just glad to tag along for the fun of it.

We got into Reno at around 11pm, got our room in the Sands/Regency, and went to gamble our alloted gambling monies away. It took a couple of hours to do, but in the end, we went bust, and called it a night.

In the morning, we went to pick up the car.

The car was/is immaculate (save for a recently noticed scrape on the trunk), and we quickly paid the sweet woman who was selling.

She was moving to Costa Rica to be with her family, and was selling everything she owned. Her last major sale was the car, and it was visibly hard for her to part with it. She told us that she and her recently deceased husband had bought it together, just 3 years ago. It was sweet, and sad. We hugged goodbyes with the sweet old lady named Taffy, and started the trek home.

It was a great drive. No rain or adverse weather to worry about, no crazy drivers to swerve around, no real problems to speak of at all. It was smooth sailing.

I haven’t done something that impulsive since… I can’t remember, but I loved every minute of it.

Aaron says that he “owes me one”, but in truth I think it may be the other way around. I had a great day and a half, and feel energized and rested to boot.

Now, as Dr. Laura would say, “Go take on the day.”

E-Mail this article to someone. Comments (0)