Fourteen hours in the lock-up

It wasn’t much fun. Indeed for most of the time it was excruciatingly boring. But it was an interesting experience and I learned something from my almost fifteen hours in the lockup at police district 9. Of course, I could have learned most of this in a shorter period of time. If they ever give opportunities to be jailed for, say, three hours tops, you should grab it.

The best part was my cellmate Dennis Short of SEIU Healthcare PA. I knew Dennis a little and it was good to get to know him more and talk with him about all sorts of things from the Grateful Dead to our campaign for health care reform.

What I was surprised I didn’t miss that much. I thought it would be my connection to the world outside, and especially to our campaign via the net. For the first hour or two I kept reaching into my pocket for my phone every time I thought of something I wanted to find out or tell someone to do. For another hour or two I kept wondering about was going on in the world. Then for the first time since I took a day off last month I started to decompress a bit. And, after I got to make a call, during which  I mostly gave my wife a list of things to ask people on the our campaign to do, I stopped wanting that immediate connection.

What I missed the most was reading. This fifteen hours was probably the longest time I’ve been more or less continuously awake without reading something since I was five years old. I just love to read, not just for the information I get or the pleasure of a well turned phrase, argument or scene. I love being bathed in words. I had a list of my personal property in my pocket and took it out four or five times during the ordeal just to read something. It was like when I was a kid and was was not allowed to bring reading material to the table. Then I would just read cereal boxes over and over again. I don’t understand why they don’t let people bring books or newspapers into the jail cell with them. That was cruel.

There was no chance to create the next great work of political philosophy written in prison either. There will be no prison notebooks by me. They took away my pen and would have taken any paper if I had it. Again, I don’t see the point. I actually started to save the paper on the bottles of water they gave me hoping I could use it to write. But there was nothing with which to write. Having read Darkness at Noon and Solzhenitsyn, I knew that you could scrape off shoe polish and mix it a bit with spit and write with it. But I had no implement to use for that purpose.

The worst part, besides boredom was my inability to find a comfortable way to sit. The cell, which was designed for one person, was about 7 feet wide and 11 feet long. The floor was concrete while the walls were steel. (It looked like a pre-fab cell block dropped in the middle of a basement.) On one side was a three foot wide steel platform that ran the length of the cell. At the opposite end, across from the bars, was a toilet. I’ve always had a hard time finding comfortable couches. That was the case here, as well. The platform was too wide for me to have my feet on the floor while leaning back against the wall. So I spent some time leaning against the wall with my feet on the platform which was never comfortable and sometimes, because of a pinched nerve that has been acting up, very uncomfortable. I spent most of the time sitting at the edge of the platform with my head in one hand, trying to get some sleep.

Eventually Dennis and I figured out how to share the platform to sleep. It tells you something that sleeping on my back a hard steel platform was the most comfortable way to be in that cell.

It became boring beyond belief after a few hours—and that’s no reflection on Dennis. I know this will come as a surprise to people who see me only as an activist or politician but I’m actually pretty much of an introvert and I get tired of talking. So, I think, does Dennis. I need a lot of time alone to think (or read) every day. After a while I just wanted to sit quietly, read, write and think. Reading and writing, as I’ve pointed out, was impossible. Thinking was hard because of the noise.

This was the next worst part was the noise. It came from a variety of sources. A radio  blared constantly. It was set to one of the black music stations. Now I’d say 90% of the music I listen to is made by blacks. I love jazz, r&b, funk, and all the contemporary descendants of those genres. But I really have no taste at al for contemporary black ballads most of which sounds like whining to me. And that’s what was on, almost constantly. (I kept waiting for a Dinah Washington torch song, to no avail)

Then there were the other inmates having conversations across three or four cells. They were, as you can imagine, very loud.

 There were also the drunk or stoned prisoners who joined us as the night went on and who carried on quite a bit.

By the time I got out, I had a splitting headache.

Being locked in a small space became really annoying after about five hours. I walk around a lot when I’m thinking. When I got the urge, all I could do was three steps one way and three steps back. I really did feel caged then. I started hanging out for a time by the bars at the front of the cell reaching out through them or stretching while holding on to them. It felt like I was trying to project myself beyond the cell.

And all the while I was trying to accomodate to the bright street lamp style lights that shined in the cells.

I loved those moments when I could get up and leave the cell—first to be finger-printed and photographed and make a phone call—which I dragged out as long as possible—then to have my pre-bail interview over a closed circuit TV with a faulty wire that so frustratingly made the sound cut in and out, and then, finally, to get released ROR by a judge over another closed-circuit TV.

With everything else going on, the stench and the food were the least of my problems. The smell was that of a heavy disinfectant over a fainter whiff of urine. Believe me, I was happy to smell the disinfectant considering where I was. But it was hot and stuffy and got hotter and stuffier as the cells filled up.

The food consisted of two pieces of bread with something that had once come out of a cow but was processed beyond belief into a cheese whose name should embarrass all Americans and a small bottle of water. As Dennis put it, the best gravy is hunger and I ate the sandwich eagerly. This was the meal given to inmates every eight hours so I got it twice.

The most depressing thing about the experience though were the conversations we overhead. Most of them were of men talking about how they wound up in jail. Most folks claimed to be innocent or to have been unjustly targeted. From my years of teaching criminal justice—and my Dad’s twenty years as a police justice—I know that this is what everyone in jail says and that most of the time it is not true. On the other hand a lot of folks were there for possession and I know that in certain neighborhood you are lot more likely to be picked up for that than others. But what was really depressing was to hear these mostly young men talk about their history in the jail or, even worse, how they were just paroled from a state prison a month or so ago when they were picked up the day I was arrested. That mean, for many of them, that they were heading back to prison.

I never felt so blessed to have grown up in the economic circumstances and the neighborhood I grew up in as opposed to a poor neighborhood in which a not insubstantial part of the population spends years of their lives in and out of the criminal justice system and prison. Given how angry I sometimes was as a teenager and the attitude I had toward authority then—and to some extent still do today—I would have been in a great deal of trouble had I grown up in the kinds of places most of the folks in jail with me grew up.

It was almost unbearingly sad to hear, over and over again, these stories of years and lives wasted.

It’s not hard to understand why being in jail is a radicalizing experience. As the night went on I go angrier and angrier at how miserable the situation was, at how long it was taking to get processed by what looks like a very inefficient system, and finally at the how so many people get caught up in this horrible system for so much of their lives.