#39 Locked Down Again, Now "Inside"

  

          “You’ve got trespassing and resisting arrest here as your charges,” the booking officer explained. She knew I was there for locking down to a bulldozer. The latter charge was presumably was a result of refusing to go with the officer when he came to arrest my lockdown companion, Maureen, and me. Oddly, the booking officer sighed, “Well, people have to voice their opinions.” She added, “Your court date will be in two days, on Thursday, so you’ll be spending that time in jail.”
            Though I might have gotten out on my $10,000 bail, our practice in the protest has been to save the money (especially for many of us who don't have that kind of money), and do the time if you've done the crime. It usually was only a day and maybe a night in the holding cell, anyhow, foir first-time offenders.
            But for Maureen and I, it would be two. I was surprised. I quickly put in a call to our jail support to let our most excellent volunteer at the other end of the line know I wouldn’t be out until Thursday. She was prepared to let my dog support folks know I’d need another day of their taking care of Sata.
            Then I put into practice an attitude of surrender, given that I was literally no longer in control of my life. Indeed, being in jail offers so many amazing lessons if we let it. First for me as someone who has never spent time in a “real” jail is the lesson about the rigid controls imposed on your life as an inmate.
            After the paperwork was done, I was directed into a room where the officer took my mugshot and then fingerprints, generated on the computer, of palms, fingertips, and even the “writer’s hand,” a print along the side of a hand. I was, as usual, curious about everything and asked why they needed that. “I’ve had my prints taken as a teacher before,” I mentioned, “but never those.”

              “That’s how Richard Allen Davis was caught, when he rested his hand on a convenience store counter.” He was the murderer of a little girl Polly Klaas. The irony did not escape me that I was now in that league of criminals on record.
            We continued on to the clothing department. My same friendly officer in as nice a way as possible told me to strip, turn around, squat, and cough—the “strip search.” Yes, humiliating in a way, less so for someone who is a practiced nudist, to be honest, but still…. And now I know what all inmates go through, surely many with far less amiability on the part of the booking officer and the newly jailed.
            Then I was issued my green jail coveralls with “Mendocino County Jail” emblazoned on the back, an orange t-shirt, orange socks, and orange canvas slip on shoes—that “orange is the new black” thing. I was also given a duffle bag of extra clothing, bedding, and what is called “the indigent bag,” a little baggie with a stubby toothbrush (one that can’t be whittled into a weapon), toothpaste, shampoo, soap, three packets of 2 Advil tablets, a couple of sheets of paper, and a stubby pencil. Later I learned that inmates who can order better stuff through the commissary call these the indigent bags, referring to those without money to ever get anything more than these minimal supplies.
            I had my glasses returned to me, thankfully—nothing like walking around in a literal haze. And then I followed the officer through a labyrinth of metal doors where we’d stop at each for clearance. The door lock would click open, she’d order me through, and the door would loudly clang shut. I would hear the sounds of the locks clicking open and shut many times throughout the day and night. “Lockdown!” became the recurring call over the intercom or simply the routine the other inmates knew too well.
            We entered the “dayroom,” a large room with built in metal tables and benches for four, and the shower stall behind a curtain. A TV screen hung from the ceiling. There was a shelf for books, a vending machine, and at the far end several individual metal cell doors.
            Then we climbed steps along the side of the room to the dorm above, fully visible behind a floor-to-ceiling metal fence. It was by now 11 pm, but the lights were on in the dorm where I saw four metal bunk beds and a set of metal lockers, figures huddled in bed or sitting up, interested in the new inmate.
            I had some trepidation about who the other women would be, what their levels of “toughness” might be, but not much. Having been a teacher in urban schools most of my life, I’ve often encountered people—both youth and adults—who either had jail records or were going to have them one day, people as tender as they were tough.
            Besides, I had no time to worry. The door clanged open. The officer quickly informed me that another inmate would show me how to make my bed and explain the rules. And that was that. She was off to go book Maureen, who had yet to hear about her fate, and the many other women waiting in the holding cell. This guard worked hard all night long.
            A woman I’ll call Angela, for being my guardian angel, immediately popped down off her top bunk and offered to show me what to do. Angela showed me how to take down the thin mattress pad off the metal bed and tie the corners of the sheet around the end of the pad, thus holding the bottom sheet in place. My mother had taught me how to do “hospital corners.” Now I know how to do “jail corners,” too—brilliant!
            “What are you in for?” someone asked, curiously.
            “Trespassing,” I said.
            “Are you one of those protestors?” someone else called out from her bed with a kind of glee.
            “Yes.”
            “I knew it!” cried another.
            I didn’t know exactly what about my demeanor indicated that status—perhaps my glasses? I smiled.
            Meanwhile, Angela was explaining where to put my duffle and that breakfast was at 5:30 am. She had on her black t-shirt that was to serve as a nightie, so I went and put on mine in the “bathroom,” which was merely a triangular corner at the other end of the room, with a toilet on the other side of a low wall. The toilet flushed like the roar of a truck—which would become one of many night-time disturbances. And the privacy of, well, you know—kiss that good-bye.
            Another woman, now sitting up in her bed, said, “I remember that little older lady who came in from the protests. She was amazing. She did our exercise session with us, 500 jumping jacks.”
            Someone else said, “Yeah, and that woman who came in with her daughter? How is she doing? She was in here a couple of times.”
            That would be Sara Grusky, one of the initiators of Save Our Little Lake Valley, an intrepid fighter for the farmlands as an organic farmer herself. Yes, she’d been in many times. Several of the women here in jail for months, if not years, had come to know our struggle. And they were often interested and supportive, I was to find.
            One woman laughed, “Well, at least you came here for a principle you believed in.” I later learned that while wrestling with a meth addiction, this perfectly sweet woman had beaten someone up under the influence, an incident she has no memory of, but has paid for with a year in one lock down or another.  She was like so many I encountered in jail, where instead of getting a real drug rehab program, they were simply wasting time, getting clean and sober without real tools.
            By now I was tucked into my own hard pallet on the top bunk, with the large fluorescent light three feet above my head. “When do the lights go off?” I asked.
            A laugh. “They are off.”
            Right. Surveillance with the “panopticon,” is always operating. Guards do walk-throughs every hour to make sure everyone is in her place and accounted for. More clicking of doors.
            Finally, Maureen as brought in around 12:30 am. When we’d arrived at the jail at 1 pm, we were told that there were just one or two other new arrestees to be booked ahead of us. Instead, we were not booked until 10 and 11 pm. Having gone through the elaborate process now myself, I could understand why it took so long. Later we were informed that men got booked ahead of women, even if the women had been waiting longer, and there were always five times as many men arrested as women. It was one of several sexist practices I would encounter “inside.”
            When Maureen came through that metal gate, I was now the one to help get her settled in her bed and acquainted with a few rules. Our cellmates started to question Maureen about her involvement and what we had done to get arrested.
            Before we climbed onto our pallets, we shared a giddy giggle and a hug over our new reality. She looked at me incredulous. “Can you believe this?” We had known it was a slight possibility that we would be in for three days, but it had never happened before to first-time arrestees, so why us, why now? Perhaps blow back by folks in the Willits community who support the bypass and are “sick and tired” of the seemingly lenient treatment of arrestees, perhaps. Someone had to pay the real costs, and we were the ones, apparently.
            Off to sleep we went, until we heard the click of the doors as the guard was making her round or someone flushed the toilet intermittently all night long.
            Or what remained of the night. At 4:30 am, the bright lights went on, and I mean bright—right over my head. A voice garbled something on the intercom. In my sleepy state, I sat bolt upright, presuming it was time to get up. Angela called over to me, “It’s not breakfast yet.” By the next morning, I could distinguish the intercom voices better: “Meds! Get your meds.” At 4:30 the women who need meds get up to get them, then return to bed for another hour. I covered my head with a sweatshirt and went back to sleep.
            All too soon at 5:30 the call came for breakfast. Maureen and I were slow moving after a couple of long nights and some disorientation that morning. We were changing from our “nighties” into our jail suit when Angela first said, “You should change in the bathroom because that mirror you see on the far wall in the day room is actually a guard station with men in there, and they can see everything except in the bathroom.” More surveillance.
            As we ambled into our clothes, Angela then warned us, “You better hurry! They don’t like you to be late.”
            We went running downstairs when an intercom voiced called, “No running!” We got to the metal door and the slim slot it in where food is handed through after you say your last name. A voice on the other side demanded, “Be on time tomorrow morning.”
            “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, perfectly serious, my mama’s Southern training coming back to me.
            Maureen stifled a giggle. In our seven hours of lockdown outside and our time in the holding cell chatting, I had learned that she has often lived her life at the margins of society by her own rules, a free-spirit who refuses to give into arbitrary authority and regulations that repress one’s expression and freedom. Submitting to jail rules would be trying, an intriguing new way of life, and fortunately temporary.
            In any case, we now realized why our cellmates wore their green jail jumpsuits to bed, and we decided we’d do the same the next morning. No rush to dress.
            After breakfast was the clean-up period. I mopped the dayroom as my contribution. Then, like everyone else, we returned to our beds, which was the scheduled practice, locked down once again, to return to sleep until the doors opened again at 8:30. It was going to be a long day—and I was already grateful I only had another full day ahead.
         Of course, I have no pictures from "inside," though I can find some online. This picture of a woman in orange in her cell looks like a college dorm room compared to our cell where we only had metal bunks and lockers, no chairs, no tables.
         But I did have reading material. In a stroke of serendipity, Angela handed me her copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, given to her by her mother. Angela thought I might enjoy reading it while I was in. Yes, I did.
         The next day's wonder and boredom require another post soon.