The Ants: Frog Gravy 70

BBC- Attenborough- Life in the Undergrowth- Ants. Planet Earth:

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account in Kentucky.

Inmate names are changed.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, Ky, August, 2008

I awake to the realization that the TV has been on for something like three days straight. I sleep on the cement floor, underneath the TV.

My right arm is numb and swollen because last night at work in the kitchen, we sliced an enormous tub, the size of a child’s wading pool, full of cucumbers, and then we sliced four gallons of okra.

I did most of the slicing, though, because Fiona, the Borderline inmate who, as a child, stabbed her mother because her mother would not let her watch Rin-Tin-Tin on television, was fired for talking to men in the hallway on the way to work. Fiona is 23 years old and has been locked up for 27 straight months now. I do not know what her charges are, but she speaks proudly of the fact that she once spent nearly a year in cell block (the hole) at KCIW PeWee Valley, for an attack on either a guard or another inmate. Fiona and I compete at completing SuDoKu puzzles in the cell.

That leaves me, Colleen, Penny, and Linda to do the kitchen job in Ricky’s World.

Colleen weighs three hundred pounds, and houses one puffy arm in a sling. At work, she tries to tackle one job per night. For the most part though, she eats. Toast and margarine and jelly. White bread and mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches; hamburgers, fried onions and cornbread; cake and fried bologna and casserole.

After breakfast this morning, Colleen wants me to help her write a grievance to Ricky Parnell, the jailer.

“Just write from the heart,” I tell her, and she does. I only help her with spelling and minor things. Her handwriting is neat and her letters are large and loopy. She has modified her punctuation marks. Each period is an exclamation point, where the period part of the point is a five-point star.

The letter says:

Grievance Mr. Ricky Parnell

I’m writing a grievance on your medical staff and the doctor.

The reason why is I fell in your kitchen working for y’all. I fell on March 3, 2008. I filled out a med slip and they took me the next day to get an x-ray. Then I went to see the doctor and they said the x-ray showed up a needle form in my hand. I have never used needles.

This bizarre statement may have come from the fact that they were looking at a fracture. The letter continues:

The doctor gave me a Tylenol and sent me on my way. My hand was still swollen and hurting really bad so I went back to the nurse and she referred me to the doctor again. So then he said we are going to get another x-ray. Then I went back to the doctor and he asked me what did the x-ray show? I told him he should know, because he is the doctor.

I was off work for 2 months with my hand swollen and hurting really bad. I went back in the kitchen in May 2008.

I went back to the nurse on 7/28/08 cause my hand was swollen and hurting really bad. The pain is going all the way up my arm. So the nurse referred me to the doctor. He was supposed to see me on Wednesday but he didn’t. I asked why and he said cause he couldn’t do anything for me. I am telling you, there is something wrong with my hand.

I also signed a paper they brought me this morning when I was asleep that the doctor can’t do anything for me and I can order tylenol on commissary. So please can you help me I’m in so much pain my hand and arm is so swollen. Also they are making me work if not I have to lay it down in county.

Thank you for your time, Colleen

The term “lay it down in county” is a constant threat to state-final-sentenced inmates in this jail. State final-sentenced inmates are Class D nonviolent inmates, for the most part, and the jail segregates them from county inmates.

The ‘county’ side of the jail is not all that much different, except county inmates are not allowed to work, they wear jailhouse clothes, they do not have a microwave, and they have more scabies, ringworm, staph and MRSA than the state-side inmates. However, lately, state inmates have had their share of staph, due to the dearth of medical care.

I spend the rest of the day drawing a train for my oldest brother, who loves trains.

Train, jail art by Crane-Station on Masonbennu’s flickr stream.

While I am drawing, there is a distraction in the cell. Linda and others have obtained a large can of Raid, and they are killing some tiny ants that occasionally pass through the cell.

I am outraged because I love ants. I say, “What in the fuck are you doing?”

“Killin’ the aints.”

“Why? They are not hurting us, these tiny ants.”

“These aints is nasty.”

“You’re gonna kill us all in the process.”

“Mind your own bidness.”

The tiny creatures struggle and drown and die in a lake of Raid. I grab the nearest Bible, and flip to Proverbs. I attempt to speak their language, the language of the gospel, because the killers are all ‘saved.’ They spend their days and nights talking about how much they love Jesus and God. They frequently quote scripture.

I tell the Raid people that Abraham admired ants and the wisdom of the ants.I quote Proverbs out loud. It says:

Proverbs 6:6-8

New International Version (NIV)

6 Go to the ant, you sluggard;
consider its ways and be wise!

7 It has no commander,
no overseer or ruler,

8 yet it stores its provisions in summer
and gathers its food at harvest.

This has no effect on the self-professed ‘saved’ killing spree. In fact, quite the opposite. One of the people who claims to follow the teachings of Jesus to the letter says to me, “You don’t believe in God, do you? I can tell.”

At my counseling session with Father Al later, I ask, “Father Al, do you believe in Satanic possession?”

“Why do you ask me?” he says.

“The joy in life is in the searching for God, I have decided.” I tell the priest. “Satan is too obvious. There is no need to search for evil.”

Released On Parole By “Mistake”: Frog Gravy 39 [updated]

Below is the uncorrected full-text version of “Released On Parole By Mistake.”

Today I found the original sentence as well as the amended sentence, and I looked at the date stamps on the two orders.

Here is the sequence of events:

I lost my jury trial and was remanded to custody on January 23, 2008.

I was final sentenced to eight years, verbally, from the bench in March, 2008, but the written order reflected two concurrent four year sentences. In other words, there was no clarification or order mentioning consecutive four year sentences, so DOC must have read the order as a total of four years.

Om June of 2008, the judge amended the sentence to reflect a “typographical error” correction that reflected two consecutive sentences for a total of eight years.

In October of 2008, I went home on parole, after serving 20% of four years on a four-year sentence and becoming parole eligible (ten months on four years).

On October of 2008, I was rearrested and taken back into custody, to serve the other half of the consecutive four-year sentences. In total, I spent a little more than 20 months in custody, ten in jails and ten in prison.

At some point I will provide photographs of these orders.

Train. Jail art by Crane-Station on flickr. Ink, magazine ink and colored pencil.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of incarceration, first in jails and then in prison in Kentucky, during 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Inmate names are changed, except for nicknames that do not reveal identity.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

PeWee (pronounced PeWee) Valley women’s penitentiary (KCIW) near Louisville, KY, my father’s birthday, 1-7-2009

The end of my stay in Fulton County Detention Center (Ricky’s World) came with a notice of parole. I had hoped for this result but not necessarily had I expected it. Inmates had warned for nearly the entire year that parole on the first try is extremely rare. They told me to expect a one-year “flop,” known as a denial of parole and continued detention. Nonetheless, I had maintained a clean jail record, held steady employment, and arranged for job, counseling and a return to my supportive husband, were I to make parole.

In March of 2008, Judge Craig Clymer denied all forms of treatment and monitoring that I had arranged, that totaled nearly six years. He denied shock probation three times and, since I refused to plead guilty in my immediate case, drug court was also denied. He sentenced me to eight years, assuring the concerned jury, who voiced a desire for me to enter drug treatment, that this treatment would be offered “in the penitentiary.” I had never made it to the penitentiary, and the jails had no treatment programs. Judge Clymer’s written sentence reflected that the eight-year sentence be served as two concurrent four-year sentences.

On October of 2008 I received this notice:

On the notice, the requirement to seek sex offender treatment was a mistake. But the rest of the order was real, and I went home to my husband on parole. As I stood outside in the sun waiting for him to arrive, I was struck by the sounds of birds, the touch of grass and the feel of the air. I conversed with another released inmate who also awaited a ride.

My husband wanted to take me out to dinner, but I was afraid to go inside a restaurant so we ordered some take out. We visited the bookstore and I picked up a copy of the 2009 Writer’s Market, because I had already done copious writing in note form, and I wanted to write about the reality of jail conditions in Kentucky.

The next day, I met with my parole officer, arranged counseling, and visited the college to see about educational programs. I attempted to meet with the man who had agreed to employ me, but he was not in. I had a required mental health evaluation. I attended a 12-step meeting.

The next morning I arose at 6 AM and went for a jog. I stayed outside for quite a while because it had been so long since I had been outside. I came home and made coffee. There was a knock on my door.

Two armed parole officers entered my home and held up a warrant, issued by Judge Craig Clymer, for my arrest. They were apologetic and almost embarrassed. One of them said he had never seen such a thing before. I was handcuffed, and I kissed my husband again, for the last time. I was jailed in the McCracken County Jail in EA, one of the two large population cells. A few days later I was shipped to KCIW, or “PeWee,” the women’s penitentiary.

Judge Clymer claimed that, after ten months, he suddenly realized that he had made an error on the written sentencing document that he called a “typographical” error. The typo had excluded an entire sentence clarifying that my eight-year sentence was two consecutive four-year sentences.

On arrival at the prison, I lost my jogging suit and every possession that I had, which was little, except for my husband’s watch that I had worn for my morning jog. Again I submitted to strip squat-and-cough searches typical of any incarceration beginning. This would be my home for the next year. Already, due to my case, I had missed my son’s last play where he was the leading role in a college play, and I had missed his college graduation, and his entrance to law school at Georgetown. My parents were elderly and not doing well and I had not seen them in years. My husband had lost his job because the law school where he taught went under. He had been evicted and moved, all without my help or support.

At the prison, I immediately took an outside job in landscape, and then set about seeing what it would take to enroll in college. Still in jail mentality, I gathered a few art supplies, but I was now busy with work and entrance testing for the college. On a couple of math aptitude tests, I was told that I scored “higher than anyone in the history of the institution,” and that was a perfect score. I scored 99the percentile in other aptitude tests, and my goal was initially to try for the legal aide program, where inmates assist other inmates with legal case work. However, the legal aide training program was eliminated due to lack of funding.

Since I was considered a Class D instead of the more serious Class C, residential treatment was not an option for me, so I signed up to attend AA meetings, twice, but was never notified that my request had been approved for meeting attendance, during my entire stay at the prison. I eventually signed up for the Horticulture program, which was excellent and enjoyable. I also took Biology at night, on a “Canteen Scholarship” that was offered because of my test scores. I became active in tutoring other inmates in math. Again, I maintained a clean record.

Horticulture was one of the most enjoyable programs I have ever participated in. The drawing that I did do now was of plants, mostly, and I drew because it helped me to memorize the plants.

The poppy Papaver rhoeas by Crane-Station on flickr. Colored pencil. Prison art.

Yesterday I met with inmate records and had a conversation about my curious release on parole and then rearrest.

“How could this mistake happen?” I ask. “Why was I released and then taken back into custody with a doubled sentence, when I had work, school and counseling all in place? How could…”

“This happens.”

“I mean, it’s unusual, isn’t it? I have never heard of this happening.”

“It’s not uncommon.”

“So, it’s common then? People just go home by mistake all the time? Please answer correctly because I am contacting the newspaper.”

The inmate records woman looked at me, shocked. She said, “We actually had one who went home, and the judge called and asked, “Why is she out, I ammended her sentence to eight years…”

“Just what I thought. That’s all I need to know.”

“You haven’t heard the rest…”

“We knew. It’s okay. I write a lot, and I wanted to get it right, about what happened here. I have no beef at all with DOC or PeWee. None at all.”

“Where are you from?”

“McCracken.”

“Ohhhhh.” Eyes roll.

“I did not commit this crime.”

“I am not stupid enough to think that, with 30,000 people in Kentucky locked up that some of them aren’t innocent. I will tell you this, though, that an appeal is an uphill battle.”

“I know.”

“But if it was me, I would stick it out until the very end.”

“I am, believe me, I am.”

“That’s what I would do.”

“Hardly anyone else would.”

Kitchen Job In Ricky’s World: Frog Gravy 33 [jail art]

Sunset, jail art: magazine ink, colored pencil, ink. cranestation on flickr.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account in Kentucky jails and in prison in 2008 and 2009.

The name Ricky is real. Others have been changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Other posts are also at Firedoglake.com in the MyFDL diary section.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, KY, August, 2008.

Tonight I dress strategically for my job in the kitchen. I have arthritis. This privately owned jail charges one dollar per tablet for canteen Advil. So I put on a sports bra. A sports bra will accommodate packets of sweetener that I plan to smuggle from the kitchen. This will right a tiny wrong, at least in my mind.

So, I have the right clothes on.

Penny, Jesse, Linda and I head to the kitchen for work. We are the jail’s designated prep crew, evening shift. We cut vegetables, fill butter and jelly cups and make KoolAid.

Turns out I am really, really good with knives. I cut vegetables like a manic Cuisinart. This makes Penny crazy. She absolutely hates, and I mean she cannot stand that I am really, really good at cutting. And I’m fast. And so, Penny spends a good deal of the evening trying to slow me down.

It goes like this:

We get to the kitchen and I check out two knives, both pieces of shit but, between the two I usually get the job done. I grab a cutting board and say to the others, “I use two knives. You guys need to check out your own knives.”

Two more knives are checked out. (Not enough for my vegetable-cutting World Cup, I might add.)

“I’m cutting,” I say.

Linda peels off from the pack to make fifty gallons of KoolAid.

Penny with the first shot across the bow: “I’m going to have you rinse all the cucumbers, and I’ll get started cutting.” Like she runs the place.

She wants a head start.

But that does nothing to my work product, so then she predictably wants one of my knives. I have prepared for this. I give up my piece of crap yellow-handle filet knife, and keep the Farberware semi-serated, plastic handle, butcher-knife sized, made-in-China yard sale knife. Penny wants this also, but I refuse to give it up.

Then Jesse wants my knife, to cut butter, of all things, a job I could have completed from start to finish with time to spare, in less than ten minutes. I refuse. She wants my cutting board. I give it to her. Penny gives Jesse the knife that I just gave Penny, the filet knife with the yellow handle. Penny gives me a piece of crap slab of wood cutting board that inmates have used for so long that there is a trench the middle, so the board looks like a boat.

I turn the board over.

My productivity is yet unhindered even though my handicap includes an instrument that somehow passes for a knife, although I doubt it would kill anyone (I’ve pondered it); to cut butter you have to run the knife under hot water first.

Penny goes nuts. She says, “You can’t use the back of the board!”

“Why not?”

“It’s…It’s…got…mold.”

There is no mold on this board. I say, “Where?”

“Right there!” She points to wood.

“On the back side?”

“Yeah, you can’t do that!”

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Penny by now, without knife and board, is not cutting. Actually she is eating. And annoying me.

I turn the board back over.

Penny is a nut farmer, of course, but I say nothing because it’s not worth it. This is not, as they say, the mountain I want to die on. Besides, my productivity remains unhindered.

After cutting something like a billion cucumbers and a whole bunch of okra, I have a good case of arthritis in my shoulder and wrist. My hand will be swollen.

The guard comes in and takes her share of vegetables for home and remarks that she should bring her entire garden in for us (me) to process. The guard is sincere, and this is meant to be a compliment, and that is how I take it.

We are supposed to make sixty-three cents a day for labor, full time (about twenty dollars per month). I have worked like an animal since May, and saw my precious twenty dollar check for the first time, in August.

I return to the cell, to the hate. I make a note to get new earplugs because the old ones have worn out.

There is much excitement in one corner of the cell, screams, yelps. A mob of inmates have found a spider and they are torturing it. Tearing off its legs, spraying it with bleach, beating it.

There was a time in my life when I questioned the presence or absence of evil, but I no longer do.

I say a prayer for the spider.

Author’s end note: I saw a lot of these sorts of incidents. They broke my heart.

Finally:

Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work:

Life In Ricky’s World: Frog Gravy 22 [with jail art]

Road. Jail art, magazine ink and colored pencil by Crane-Station on flickr. This is not very clear, in fact it is sort of surreal, and so it reminded me of a wendydavis dream, only nowhere as beautiful as her writing.

Frog Gravy is an account of incarceration in jails and in prison in Kentucky, in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Names have been changed, except the name Ricky is real.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

During my stay in McCracken County jail, since education and treatment were unavailable, and there was absolutely nothing else to do, I began writing from morning until night, with no-shank pens. No-shank pens are only about four inches long and they are sleeved in flimsy plastic. Since we only received them on Wednesdays and since most inmates used the ink for mascara, keeping pens was difficult, and so sometimes I would mix water with the ink to make it last.

I wrote a great many letters, to the kind and receptive Governor Steve Beshear, whom I consider a good man, and also to Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Amnesty International, the Innocence Project, several agencies in Washington and Frankfort, a Louisville paper, and several Kentucky educators, such as the law professor and author, Robert Lawson.

I wrote about the jail conditions and I was hated for it.

I ran all sorts of stuff in to Frankfort, including the pregnant woman incident, the sexist Class D policy that prevented women from working, the lack of recreation, and the ban on education. I once even mailed two paper towel squares to Frankfort, and asked how they would suggest I clean a cell with six people in it, with the two paper towels that we had been issued. I absolutely swear I did these things.

When the state showed up for a surprise visit and interviewed me in the cell, with all of my no-shank letters attached to a clipboard, I knew my days in McCracken were numbered. Indeed, I was shipped out shortly thereafter.

Ricky’s World itself was better, as I have mentioned, but the inmates were very difficult to live with because they were hateful.

Birds, jail art, ink, magazine ink, and colored pencil by Crane-Station on flickr.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, KY, 7/21/2008

Several inmates in the larger population cell have been moved to smaller cells, due to racial tension. I am now in a tiny four-person cell with five: three black and two white. Three black women keep me up until 3:30 AM (I go to work at 5:30 AM) talking about men raping chickens and sheep, girls having sex with horses, and their personal plans to immediately get pregnant upon release.

They are mean to me the next morning because I refuse to attend communion with them. I stay silent, fearing that any comment will start a race riot. They hate my writing. They hate my soap. They hate my t-shirt. They hate when I read. They hate when I talk. They hate when I do not talk.

In time, things simmer down. I absolutely refuse to engage in any conflict. I share my coffee. Things get better.

A fellow kitchen worker, Micki, develops an enormous boil on her ass, which comes to work with her each day, where she recruits other inmates into the kitchen bathroom to squeeze it, despite my repeated warnings not to do this.

Micki eventually fills out her $45.00 “protocol,” and the jail takes $45.00 and does nothing. By the time Micki is removed from the kitchen, three other inmates have staph. She is then started on an antibiotic without the benefit of a doctor visit, and eventually the culture result is positive.

Two of the staph inmates also work in the kitchen, and one has an untreated, purulent, red-streaked, draining arm wound. She is washing dishes without benefit of gloves, because none of us have gloves that fit. The jail has extracted the $45.00 and done nothing, so, she comes to the kitchen for work, gets a washrag, soaks the rag in vinegar, and rests the infected arm on the vinegar-soaked rag, on the side of the steel sink, explaining, for our benefit, that “the vinegar will draw it out.”

Another kitchen worker has a positive TB skin test, but the jail does not want to pay for a chest x-ray. After working in the kitchen for weeks, they place her in the crowded cell and tell her that she cannot return to work until she contacts the jail she came from, the rationale being that the former jail may have done an x-ray.

In addition to the myriad of physical illnesses and acute conditions as well as rampant morbid obesity, this jail is as rife with mental illness as any state insane asylum. Bipolar illness is a given, but there is also an abundance of paranoid schizophrenia. I assume that a good deal of the tension and fighting and hateful acts are actually due to untreated mental illness.

Still, the days in Ricky’s World are a test of my patience, and I am grateful for the chance to draw and write, because otherwise there is the possibility that I might slam someone up against a wall and start yelling, “There is nothing wrong with you, other than that you are a mean, despicable, lying, hateful bitch!! That’s it! And don’t “give it to God.” Stop being mean, rude and hateful.”

Author’s end note: Frog Gravy posts are always posted at MyFDL on Firedoglake.com first. I write about other subjects there also, under the name Crane-Station

The Letter From My Son: Frog Gravy 21 [with jail art]

Saguaro, jail art with colored pencil and magazine ink by Crane-Station. Chosen today for Robert Alexander Dumas

Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky in 2008 and 2009, first in jails and then in prison, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Names have been changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Frog Gravy posts are always originally posted at Firedoglake in MyFDL in my diary section. Please bear with me at this site. I am not very good with technology, so I am just figuring out what categories are. I am trying to sort posts accordingly. When I got out, for example, the cell phones were completely different.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, KY, 9-14-08, just prior to the Presidential election.

When I found out about McCain’s running mate, I wrote a brief note to my son, and said, “WTF?”

His reply, as well as an update on what he is doing as I sit in Ricky’s World in Hickman, KY, is dated 9-14-08.

“Dear Mom,

“I must apologize for missing last week’s letter. I am still establishing an efficient study schedule, but if this letter stands for anything, it is for the fact that my plan is working. I managed to knock out all of next week’s reading this weekend. My friends and I came up with an apt description for the pressure of law school. It’s a bit like jogging in front of a slow moving steam roller. If you fall even remotely behind, it is a death sentence.”

“My plan is to do all of my reading on weekends while everybody else is partying. The problem is this: this week our professors laid it on a bit heavy. I think we totaled about 150 pages of reading on the week…a lot, but completely manageable. But we also have writing assignments. So, when everybody else is juggling writing assignments with the class reading the next morning, I will be able to address these writing projects free of any burdens. People will claim that pressure motivates them to work harder and more efficiently. That fact was true for me at certain points in college. The stakes are too high for that kind of pressure to be manageable. And anyway, I need the time to review black letter law books during the week.”

“My curriculum is a bit different than for standard 1Ls. I may have told you…I opted for an alternate curriculum that, to my knowledge, is only offered here at Georgetown. The curriculum is supposed to teach students not just the “what” of law, but also the “why.” We read cases and then supplement them with bits of history and philosophy. So far, the extra supplementary materials have given our readings a scholarly flair, but the one characteristic that I like most involves people. From what I understand, the curriculum attracts a more politically involved, open-minded student body…”

-snip-

“My roommate and I chose to take a few hours today and visit the Air and Space Museum. We had originally planned to see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but the Archives are closed on Sunday. Nonetheless, having seen, among other things, the first plane to propel the Wright brothers into history, the first plane to break the sound barrier, Sputnik, the Spirit of St. Louis, samples from the surface of the moon, Skylab, a lunar space module, a V-2 rocket, several space craft and aircraft of all shapes, sizes and speeds, I would hesitate to cal the day unsuccessful. Furthermore, none of the aforementioned was a replica. I was doubtful at first, and so I asked a museum attendant who assured me, that when I was looking at the Bell X-1 jet that propelled Chuck Yeager past Mach-1, I was in fact looking at the Bell X-1 jet that propelled Chuck Yeager past Mach-1.”

“I see you took notice of McCain’s running mate. All that can be said of her has been said in every venue aside from the media. In the first week after McCain announced his decision, the only thing I heard about Palin had to do with her pregnant daughter. It was maddening. Rather than take note of her spotty education and lack of experience, people seemed to be fixated on Palin’s views about her daughter’s decision to avoid an abortion. My roommate and I compared it to a situation in which an elephant lands in your living room, and everybody focuses on the fact that the elephant has a green toenail, while you stand screaming in the background that it’s a fucking elephant….aaaaaaahhh!!!”

“I listened to a radio talk show host who said that the decision was evidence of political aptitude on the part of McCain. Even in the insulation of a campaign he realizes he is losing this election. Rather than go the standard route and opt for Mitt Romney, essentially conceding defeat, he throws a hail Mary pass and picks Palin.”

“The thing that is so maddening about this situation is the fact that people cite one of her merits as involving the fact that people can relate to her….that she’s just another one of the crowd. People fail to understand that the qualities that entail good leadership naturally set people apart. We elect people because they stand out, because they presided over the editing of the Harvard Law Review and led a successful political campaign as a minority figure in a major metropolitan area and carried on their resume a whole host of other unique accomplishments…not because they had the wherewithal to drive their children to hockey practice each day like the rest of us. This election is not really about McCain anyway. He’s the “other guy.” The question in this election is whether we will elect Barack Obama or whether we will not elect Barack Obama…..I count myself fortunate enough to be in close proximity to the steps where he will take his oaths if elected.”

My son ends the letter with “Much Love.” A photograph is enclosed. I apply State-issue toothpaste, the universal jail house glue, to the back of the photograph, and stick it to the cement-block wall above my bunk. The television is airing Black Entertainment Television (BET) at maximum volume.

I return to the steel table and continue to work on a drawing, with magazine ink and commissary colored pencils that were manufactured in Indonesia by, I am fairly certain, people in an outsourced sweat shop who do not have the time or supplies to draw.

The $45.00 Ice Pack: Frog Gravy 19 [with jail art]

Birds, drawn in jail, by Crane-Station. Colored pencil, magazine ink.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky in 2008 and 2009, first in jails and then in prison, and is reconstructed from my notes.

This post is from jail.

Frog Gravy posts are also located on Firedoglake.com, in MyFDL.

Names have been changed, except in this post, the name Ricky is real.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, KY, 7-31-08

Ricky’s World is a vast improvement over McCracken County Jail,contrary to inmate urban legend. Some would strongly disagree with me. Ricky runs a tight ship. His is, for the most part, a jail that serves as a prison for Class D non-violent drug offenders. Men outnumber the women, and the jail is overcrowded.

Almost everyone is offered work, since nearly all of the inmates are “final sentenced” State inmates. There is one 12-step meeting each week. A caring priest, who is like a counselor to me and many others, visits each week.

The library is actually quite good. When family members send books to us, we are required to donate them to the library, and then check them out. One of the first books I checked out was The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. There are history books, some educational materials, and children’s books. Since I love Mother Goose, I occasionally check out nursery rhyme books. I also become a fan of Sudoku. We can check out board games as well.

We are actually offered legitimate recreation for one hour each day. The outside cage is tiny, but it is outside nonetheless, and if you crouch and peek through the keyhole in the steel door to the outside world, you can see a cemetery.

There is another view to the outside, through a small window in the kitchen. You can even see some trees.

Lights are actually turned off at night. During the day, they are not quite as burning to the eyes as the lights are in McCracken.

We are allowed real pens. But the best part is the colored pencils. We can get them from canteen. I begin drawing nearly every day. I mail the drawings to my family. I combine colored pencil work with colors from magazine pictures. If you rub deodorant onto some toilet paper and then rub that onto a magazine picture, the ink comes off nicely and you can use it for art work. It also makes nice makeup. I find all sorts of pictures, in magazines and books, and I spend my spare time drawing, and experimenting with various items in the cell that serve as art supplies.

My hands are still raw from my first job here: washing inmate dishes in the kitchen. I am transferred to a different kitchen job: prep crew. In the evening, when the clean-up crew is finished, we go to the kitchen and fill butter and jelly cups and make Kool-Aid. Then we cut fresh vegetables.

We fill 250 butter cups, 250 jelly cups, and make 50 gallons of Kool-Aid. Then we cut hundreds of pounds of vegetables; Okra, cucumbers, and squash. Most of the cut vegetables are used in inmate meals; guards occasionally take home sacks of the cut vegetables.

There is no screaming man in an isolation cell, and the guards are very nice, for the most part. Some are older; we call one elderly woman “Miss Granny.”

At night, I try to invent ways to minister to my swollen hands. They are shiny, red and blistered. The guards occasionally bring me a bandaid. I carefully slice the it into two strips with a tiny scalpel that I have made from my disposable razor. Two bandaid strips last me most of the day.

I make the scalpels by stepping on the plastic razor carefully, breaking the plastic away from the blade. Then, I fold the blade until it breaks into two parts. I leave some plastic around the ends of the blade. I use the tiny instruments for sharpening pencils and separating elastic sock threads to make hair ties.. However, since they are considered contraband shanks, I keep them carefully hidden.

Bandaids are not sold on commissary; the jail wants you to fill out a “protocol.” A protocol is also known in some circles as a “medical kite,” a request form to see the medical department. When you fill out a protocol, the jail takes $45.00 off your books, and sends you to an office where you have a conversation with someone who tells you there is nothing they can do, or, it is not their department.

Sometimes, but not very often, a Tylenol is given. I have seen inmates pay as much as $90.00 for a single Tylenol tablet. I prefer Advil anyway, and it sells for $1.00 per tablet on commissary, so sometimes I splurge and get some Advil. The jail makes hundreds of dollars each month from this alone.

One woman I work with also lives in my cell. Her name is Colleen. She must weigh at least three hundred pounds, and she is very sweet. Inmates take advantage of her and make fun of her. Her hair is thinning. So is mine. I wonder about some nutritional deficiency causing accelerated aging in everyone.

Colleen is accident prone, and one day in March of this year, she slipped and fell, while working in the kitchen. She may have broken her arm, but no real doctor ever looked at it.

Now it is nearly August, and her arm is still swollen, shiny, red and painful. It looks like a great big shiny ham hock. She wakes up crying at night.

The jail will not allow Colleen to have a bag of ice without a protocol. Colleen filled out the required protocol. She paid the required $45.00, met with some staff, and returned to the cell.

The staff did not want Colleen to open the bag of ice and use the ice in her KoolAid, so they put garlic, salt and spices all over the ice and then delivered the whole mess to the cell, not realizing, I assume, that salt melts ice.

In the middle of the night, the bag leaked garlic-spice-salt water all over a couple of bunks and the whole cell reeked of garlic. Colleen got no benefit for her $45.00 bag of ice because the salt melted the ice, and Colleen was left with a plastic bag that looked like a used condom.

“What do you think?” she asks me, as she tries to wiggle a puffy, sausage-sized finger.

“I think you need to see a doctor,” I say.

Colleen tries to tell the staff that she cannot work, and they threaten to put her in the hole if she does not work. Somehow, she fashions a sling from a t-shirt, comes to work, and asks me to whip the jelly for her, so that the jelly will be liquefied and she can use one hand to dip the jelly into jelly cups.

Meanwhile, I fill 250 butter cups and begin slicing cucumbers with another cucumber-cutter, named Fiona.

Fiona has some psychiatric issues that I have narrowed down to either borderline or Munchausen’s; I have not decided yet.

As we are cutting cucumbers, Fiona says, “I don’t know why they let me have knives. I put a butcher knife into my mother because she wouldn’t let me watch Rin-Tin-Tin on television.”

But she has a severe speech impediment, so the sentence comes out, “…I put a butchow knife intow my mothow…”

And I think, I am living in an insane asylum.

Belly Of The Beast: Ricky’s World. Frog Gravy 9

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily living during incarceration in Kentucky, during the years 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes. Names are changed, except in this case, Ricky is a real name. Nicknames that do not reveal identity are also unchanged.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Belly Of The Beast: Ricky’s World. Fulton County Detention Center, early May, 2008.

After committing a major game misconduct by writing the Governor, various government agencies in Frankfort and Washington, about thirty other people, and a newspaper in Louisville, I am transferred out of McCracken County Jail to the famed Fulton County Detention Center also known as ‘Ricky’s World.’ I will become known in the inmate world as the one that wrote herself out of McCracken County Jail.

I first heard of Ricky’s World when I was in the hole after my trial (My judge wanted me in the hole. We had an adversarial courtroom history and would add to it before we uh, ‘divorced.’)

A woman in the hole with me in McCracken said that when she was at Ricky’s World playing truth-or-dare, she ate pussy on a steel table in the cell on a dare, and the next day, Ricky called her into his office and said, “You mean to tell me that you ate pussy on mah dinner table?”

Ricky’s World is a privately owned and operated jail in Hickman, KY. The jailer’s first name is Ricky. Ricky is an enormous man, the size of a tree.

Ricky’s World is famed in the Kentucky inmate community as being one of the places where the ‘worst of the worst’ are shipped.

Since Hickman is an hour away from my husband, he will have to drive two hours each week for his fifteen-minute visit. This is a source of personal amusement for the judge.

During my ride to Ricky’s World, two guards in the front seat discuss slaughtering chickens, planting vegetables and shopping at WalMart and in the back seat a male inmate and I discuss our legal cases.
On arrival I am placed in a hole that doubles as a holding cell for an hour, and I do step-ups on the cement ledge for an hour. A tray arrives through the food slot but I am only able to positively identify the cookies, so I eat two cookies for lunch.

A guard retrieves me to check me into the facility, produces a sturdy 30-gallon black garbage bag with the whole of my new life in it and upends the contents onto the cement floor in front of the front desk in the jail entryway. She begins to paw through the contents consisting of, to my shock and utter horror, all of the mail, pictures, books and magazines that my family had attempted to send me in McCracken.

I observe her for about five minutes and assume, without internal debate on the merits, that she is high. She finally says, “You are a State inmate. I will let you have all of this.” I silently thank God and we head to the cell. We pass a large men’s population cell and head down a hallway with wolf whistles and cat calls receding. The long hallway is painted a depressing grey and the walk actually slopes downward, even though the facility is on ground level, giving the feel of decent into an actual dungeon. Adding to this feel is the fact that none of the cells we pass have windows of any kind. The atmosphere is dark.

We arrive at a door to a cell, and the guard accompanying me fumbles with the keys for a bit, then hands them to me, and says, “Here, you open it.”

The cell is a twelve-person cement room that houses several people on the unfinished cement floor in addition to four rows of three-tiered steel bunks, for a total of nineteen or twenty inmates. When the door closes, I notice how dark it is compared to McCracken and I am thankful, yet disoriented by the lack of any windows to a hallway, as well as the lack of a clock.

I claim a space on the floor and notice that most of the cell occupants are someplace else. Another inmate sees what I notice and says, “They’re at rec. Out there with all the drama. How much time you got?”

“Eight years,” I say. “More time than that woman at PeWee that boiled her baby and fed it to her husband.”
Two inmates, Tiki and Brooke, are seated at a PlayStation. There is even a microwave, I note with increasing thankfulness.

TiKi is younger than my son, has been here for a year, and is a War on Drugs inmate that will go home soon on the Governor’s new early release program.

TiKi is playing “Grand Theft Auto” on the PlayStation.

On the screen, a criminal runs up and down a city street with a nightstick, mercilessly beating the hell out of innocent pedestrians. He runs to the driver’s side of a stopped car, opens the door, throws the driver onto the street, and steals the car.

Brooke asks, “Is this the one where he takes the prostitute into the woods and fucks her?”

TiKi’s car thief picks up a streetwalker and drives to the woods with her and stops. On the screen the car starts rocking, and she says, “Look at the car move faster and faster, and when she’s done she gets out.”
The car stops rocking and the hooker gets out. TiKi says, “Now look. He shoots her and steals her money.”
After killing the prostitute and stealing her money, the car thief returns to the car and drives away, running over several pedestrians on the sidewalk.

TiKi’s thief stops at a pay phone, gets on the phone and says, “I want to show these punk-ass bitches how a real drive-by works.”

The callee asks, “Don’t you just shoot ‘em like you always do?”

“Can’t just shoot ‘em in a drive-by shooting, dickhead. You gotta be in a car,” answers the thief. “I’m gonna show these people how to shoot from the car. What do you think?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” says the callee.

TiKi is frustrated. She says, “I cain’t git the gun to aim the way I want it to, oh hail. You cain’t just shoot ‘em, gotta be in a car, it’s a drive-by. This is pissin’ me the fuck off motherfucker-you-just-shot-me-you-stupid-prick.”

Author’s end note: For those of you familiar with Grand Theft Auto, my recall of the telephone conversation above may not be word-for-word accurate. It is, however, in essence what I heard.