Jail And Prison Commissary

McCracken County Jail, Paducah, KY commissary list, partial list.

Ricky’s World, Fulton County Detention Center, Hickman, KY, partial list.

KCIW, Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women, PeWee Valley, KY, partial commissary list.

The prison commissary is a canteen, or store, where inmates purchase hygiene products, food items, stamps, paper, and pretty much everything they will use beyond the barest essentials. Jails will issue what resembles a distressed traveler kit upon admission, but nothing more, unless the inmate qualifies for indigent commissary, which is rare and limited to a few sheets of paper and a few stamps.

Prisons will discard everything that an inmate has upon admission, even if it is unopened, and from another approved commissary, and the inmate must start over.

I do not know how juvenile canteen works or what is available.

Inmate commissary in this country is lucrative. Many internet articles talk about prison commissary profits.

Jail commissary is very limited. Prison commissary is not. Both venues are expensive, although the prison canteen is roughly equivalent to WalMart, at least for some items.

Here is an example of some prices. McCracken is a publicly owned jail; Ricky’s World is a private jail; KCIW is a state-run prison.

One soda McCracken: $1.40
The same soda Ricky’s World: $2.00
The same soda, state prison: $0.65

Suave shampoo 15 oz (think dollar store)
McCracken: $3.78
Fulton (Ricky’s World): $3.99
KCIW, prison: $2.25

I was not allowed to work in McCracken County jail, although I was a State inmate, Class D. Their reason at the time was that if female Class D inmates worked outside jobs, say, in the community, they would likely get pregnant. So, in McCracken, I received no state pay. The burden of commissary fell to my husband and my family. I wanted to be self supporting through my own contributions, but it simply was not allowed.

In Fulton, I earned sixty-three cents per day for full time kitchen work. Although the jail was private, it did receive funding for meals. We wore bar-coded bracelets. At each meal we were scanned.

Some women worked outside jobs at charities. They were required to take their noon meal at the charity, then return to the jail to be scanned, however, they were not allowed to eat the meal that they had been scanned for.

I made about $12.60 per month in the private jail. This did not even cover phone time, and so again, expenses fell to my husband and family and again, I wanted to be self-supporting through my own contributions but it was not possible.

In prison I earned twenty dollars a month for full-time work and then later, full-time school. I commend Kentucky for this: Once we made it to prison, if we took the initiative to attend school and remain in good standing, we were paid as if we were working. Still, twenty dollars a month is not enough to live on and so, again, the burden fell to my family and my husband.

Since there is no cooking or very limited cooking allowed in the jails, the jail commissary includes nothing fresh.

In prison, I would venture to guess that if inmates quit buying Ramen noodles, the economy would collapse. I saw some of the most creative meals I have ever seen in my life, made in microwaves, with Ramen noodles as a base.

As I write this, about two and one half million Americans are locked up, and their families are being raped by corporations for canteen funds.

What, then, does the bartering economy in prison look like? What are the acceptable forms of currency now that smoking is banned? Well, stamps are probably the closest thing to cash. Phone time, just about any food item is used, with coffee, sugar and creamer being very popular.

Some inmates draw pictures on envelopes and trade these for stamps and phone time, especially if the family on the outside is poor. Also, as I have mentioned before, many women trick write. They write to men or pen pals on the outside, and the men support them. Often the support is substantial.

Inmates carry no cash and there is a monthly limit to the money put on an inmate’s books.

I believe that when someone is locked up they should have the opportunity to work, and that the pay should be sufficient for the inmate to support herself. I also believe that the employer should be allowed to vouch or be a reference for the inmate’s work efforts, so that the inmate can support herself upon release.

This is not the case today.

Police lineup. World shut your mouth:

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:

My Day To Clean The Cell: Frog Gravy 32 [with jail art]

Flower. Jail art by Crane-Station on flickr. Magazine ink, colored pencil. McCracken County Jail banned art supplies, so this was done at Ricky’s World.

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

Names have been changed, except in this case, the name Bill Adams is real.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

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

McCracken County Jail, Cell 107, sometime in February, 2008

At 5 AM, the steel door opens and a Class D, accompanied by a guard, rolls a mop bucket into the cell. I get up to retrieve the bucket and attached supplies, and begin cleaning the four-person cell housing six inmates: four in steel bunks and two on the floor.

Everyone else in the cell is asleep because we have predetermined a rotating cleaning schedule. We take turns and, whoever cleans has control of the TV for the day. My TV thing never really works out very well, because I cannot handle any conflict, so when another seasoned inmate like YaYa hijacks my TV day, I am just not aggressive enough to fight it. After all, she outweighs me by 185 pounds.

The surfaces in this cell that I will clean are as follows: the steel toilet, sink and mirror in the bathroom, the shower, the steel table and benches, the TV, the telephone cradle, the hallway windowsill and the floors.

The supplies that I have to clean these surfaces are a mop with bucket and clean mop water, two individual paper towel squares and one-half bottle of watered down disinfectant.

In eager anticipation of this cleaning duty, I have pre-written a letter to Frankfort, asking for some advice on how the clean a four-person cell housing six, with two single-layer paper towel squares.

I snatch the paper towel squares, fold them, insert them into the Frankfort envelope with the letter, affix postage, and place the letter with my outgoing mail. I then produce a Maxipad from my pad ration (I do not use pads myself) and clean the cell with a Maxipad.

The jailer here, Bill Adams, has posted two signs in the window for us and I read them. The first one says:

Staph skin infection and MRSA. What is a Staph infection?

Staphylococcus aureus is one of the most common infections in the US.

Staph is ususally found on human skin, the nose, the armpit, and the groin area.

Most of the time, Staph carried in the nose or on the skin does not cause infection. When it does, it usually causes minor infections, such as pimples, boils, or abscesses.

What is MRSA?

MRSA is a type of Staph germ that has developed resistance…-snip-…pimples, boils, abscesses…-snip…A sample of drainage…-snip-…other antibiotics…

How do I know if I have a Staph infection?

…skin may be warm, swollen, have pus, pimples, boils, blisters…-snip-…may be mistaken for spider bites…

The second sign says:

How can I prevent Staph?

1) Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands…-snip-…10 seconds with soap and water.

2) Do not share…

What should I do if I think I have Staph?

Immediately notify the medical department by filling out a request form.

Notify a deputy.

Do not squeeze the boil or pimple.

Later in the day, we all learn that Meg has a sore on her labia, because she announces, at maximum volume, “I’ve got a sore on my tooter you guys.”

But since she is from Boston or someplace ‘back East,’ her statement comes out like this, “I’ve go-aht a so-ah oh-un my too-dah. I can’t help it if I’ve go-aht a boy-ull oh-un my puss.”

She asks me if she should pop it. I say, “No. Go to the doctor and tell them that you have a vaginal infection.”

Meg writes out all these forms and, five days later, when the sore is the size of Volcanoes National Park, they see her (and extract five dollars from her books).

They want to know if she has been masturbating too much. After several more days, she takes her first antibiotic tablet, but, in the meantime, five other inmates from the passing public have been sharing a toilet, a sink, a shower and a dining table with Meg, her puss, and her sore.

At daylight, breakfast arrives (it is actually pretty good here, I will give McCracken County jail that much but nothing else): sausage, 1 sl toast, dry cereal and peaches. Down the hall, Harry, now awake in his isolation cell screams, “HELLLLP! Let me out!! HELPME! HelpmehelpmehelpmeHELP!”

“Ever seen Harry?” I ask Christie.

“Never once,” she replies. “And I’ve been here for seven months. I do not think they ever let him out for rec.”

“He smeared shit on the walls, I heard,” offers Tina.

I say, “Maybe he wouldn’t do that if they’d lighten up on the pepper spray and provide rec to the man. He might have been kinda normal when they put him in there for all we know. Putting anyone in that situation will make them crazy.”

The ‘wash your hands’ portion of the posted signs actually makes sense. That is, of course, if there is a way to do this.

There is an entire hallway of cells in this very jail, with these very signs posted everywhere, that lack soap, hot water, or paper towels. The push-button water spout in the steel sinks points upward like a drinking fountain, and the water stays on only for a fraction of a second when you depress the steel button.

In these cells, that are constantly occupied by a transient passing parade, you must push the water spout button with one hand, and swipe the other across the stream. Then, you wipe the hands on the pants and go sit on the urine, semen and feces smeared cement floor, to stare at the hair and black mold in the floor drain.

These cells include: the drunk tank, the ‘suicide watch’ (hole) cells, the holes, and, yes, (This’ll kill ya)- the medical watch cells!

If you have Staph and are removed to ‘medical watch’ (the hole), there is no way to wash your hands. In fact, there is not a single bar of soap in that entire hallway of over-occupied cells. You cannot brush your teeth or shower either. During my week in the hole, I never showered, brushed my teeth, or touched any soap to my hands.

And trust me, there are lots and lots of bowel movements going on every day, sans hand washing in that entire hallway of holes. And that is just one example of one hallway, in one jail.

Author’s end note: I am, in spirit, with the October2011 group. I cannot help but picture this clip, Gary Oldman: “Everyone!”

The Red Song: Frog Gravy 31 [with jail art]

Grace. Jail art by Crane-Station on flickr. Ink, colored pencil, magazine ink, a discarded hymnal page, and coffee. I soaked the page in coffee to age it, then tore the soaked edges to make it look charred, dried out the page, and then affixed it to the background page with commissary toothpaste. Again, for the magazine ink (great stuff, I might add), put some canteen Secret deodorant onto toilet paper and then rub the magazine picture. The ink comes right off, but the ink does not look identical to the picture. You have to experiment. “Amazing Grace” seemed appropriate for today.

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

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

However, Barkley is a real name.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

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

KCIW (Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women), PeWee (pronounced Pee Wee) Valley women’s penitentiary near Louisville, Ky, Christmas Eve, 2008

Today I will work alone all day, in the heavy rain. As I leave Ridgeview Dormitory, an inmate says, “Bird Lady. Look at that bird.” She points and I look.

A gorgeous male cardinal perches on the razor wire.

Razor wire stretches in every direction, inside and outside the prison. The prison itself is located in an upscale community called PeWee Valley, a suburb of Louisville. Here you have your cul de sac, and here you have your prison. Over here is the dry cleaners and the coffee shop and the bookstore, and yes, over here, the penitentiary.

The bird’s foot is almost completely amputated, hanging by skin, turned backward. He extends his wing to occasionally correct his balance, determined to make the best of the very razor wire that caused the injury. I pause to allow an epiphany to take effect, and then continue my walk to work.

On the way to recycle, where I break down cardboard boxes, I come across a large earthworm beached on the sidewalk, so I move him. Everything is, thankfully, a quarter of a mile walk or so, a walk I always enjoy.

As I pass the main building that houses laundry, Assessment and Classification (AC), library, transportation, legal aide and commissary, the most hateful reverse racist guard in the prison that I call Ogre because she is hideous, is yelling at a white inmate that I also know, who is a soft-spoken nurse on the outside. Ogre shouts, “Why don’t you just go to Hell! Why don’t you just go on back to where you came from. Get the hell out of here. Get out of my sight!” I can see that the inmate is near tears. I was also near tears one time, when Ogre screamed at me for no reason whatsoever, and forced me to put on high-water pants and clothing small enough for a child.

I would not be at all surprised if Ogre spoke backward or neighed like a horse, or spoke in a complex mixture of ancient languages and dialects.

I see my friend Lisa, who killed her brother-in-law in a drunk driving accident where she was also in possession of a vast mixture of unprescribed prescription drugs, and say hello. She has less time than me: three years, and, the day after Christmas, two days from now, her father on the outside will kill himself, but we do not know this yet.

I pass an inmate with her vested service dog in training, named Barkley. Barkley is a seven-month-old cream colored doodle. I am not exactly sure what a doodle is (golden retriever x poodle?), but Barkley is very sweet and pretty. Everyone loves him, but we are not allowed to touch him when he is wearing a vest.

At recycle, the boxes are soaked through, and soaked cardboard turns to slime, but I do not care because I love working outside.

After work, I obtain a pass, go the the library, my favorite place in the prison, and check out A Plague of Frogs: The Horrifying True Story, by William Souder, and walk back to my dorm where I speak with my first prison roommate, Ashley, before we go to dinner.

Ashley is twenty-three, six months younger than my son, and she looks like a cheerleader. She has been locked up for the better part of six years. She hears from her family about once a month or so, which I cannot imagine, but she says they are sick of her, and so she has s sugar daddy. A ‘sugar daddy’ in this instance is a male on the outside who provides financial support (often substantial) to locked up women.

Ashley says, “I’ll need about two hundred dollars to get what I need for the rest of the winter.” She flips through a clothing and accessory catalog.

Ashley has a convoluted combination of sentences that she is in various stages of serving, or serving out; I do not really understand it.

She comes from a well-off family, and in fact used to be a cheerleader and an honor student. Her family was proud of her. She had brains and beauty and had earned some type of scholarship with the University of Kentucky.

But then, Ashley was the driver in a terrible car accident where someone was killed. The victim’s family did not want Ashley to serve prison time, but the Kentucky Commonwealth sentenced her to three years at 85%. This marked the beginning of Ashley’s professional criminal career. She learned how to sell and use drugs and put this skill to use on the outside to pay bills, because no one would hire her with her record upon release. She was caught, but then smuggled drugs into jail, charged with more felonies, and so on.

Instead of spending the six years on a university education, Ashley has spent the time in various places of ‘correction’ adding to her skill set as a professional criminal, getting into trouble at one place and being shipped to another. Like me, she spent time in Ricky’s World, Fulton County, where the worst of the worst (or people who write the governor about jail conditions) are sent.

Now Ashley and I are roommates at Ridgeview. She was initially in a dormitory that is located outside the gates of the prison. (Yes, there is a dorm outside the gates of the prison that is akin to a halfway house.) But she got in trouble out there, lost her ‘community housing,’ her job and her parole possibility . All of this for a “six thirteen.”

A “six thirteen” is a write-up for sexual activity of some sort- kissing or hugging, touching or whatever, and like so many incarcerated young adult women, Ashley was not able to set aside her sexual drive, and became attracted to women.

After we talk, I go outside to stand and wait for the announcement call to dinner, and I spot the injured cardinal in a tree. The inmate cardinal is singing.

And that is when I realize that music has color.

Author’s end note: I do not know Ashley’s whereabouts today, but I believe that she is free, based on a couple of look up searches in Kentucky Online Offender Lookup.

I cannot help it:

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.