Jail Speak. Ben Langston

socks are cheap, linty. That’s why the floor was always dirty in the Shack—sock lint. Once a month inmates got a new pair. They lasted one week. One day if the inmate went for a jog in the yard.

      I’m no expert, but ugly seems to be the rule when it comes to men’s feet. Or maybe I am an expert. I’ve been through a lot of step 8s, more than seven hundred.

      THIS is step 9: order the inmate to bend over and to spread his buttocks.

      What to look for is a string. A string coming from the ass. Strings are for the quick and easy removal of, say, two lighters wrapped in a plastic bag, or a cell phone. The strings are hard to see. They’re usually black so they blend in with the hair. The ass hair. It’s pretty easy to turn any string black. Shoe polish works.

      If you see a string, don’t pull it. Never pull the string. Contact a lieutenant. A lieutenant verifies, then contacts medical. Medical does the removing. Make sure it’s a string. There’s usually some rolled up bits of toilet paper, so you have to be sure. Use a flashlight when in doubt.

      The trick to get through step 9 is to only look for what doesn’t belong. Look for those strings, or the end of a condom. Don’t look at the dingle-berries or hemorrhoids—work that tunnel vision.

      THIS is what I found stripping: one suspicious-looking hollowed-out pencil. At least a hundred loaves of bread (an entire loaf was down the sleeve of one guy’s shirt). A case worth of the yellow plasticware from the chow hall, mostly butter knives. A few hundred pounds of jail meat wrapped in napkins: turkey burgers, chicken legs, Salisbury steaks, seafood salad. A thong converted from boxers. A bread bag full of ice. A dozen razor blades extracted from the BIC razors sold at the commissary. A nine-inch mop-handle whack (jail speak for club). Five and a half dead cockroaches—four were in the pants cuff of one inmate—not contraband, just nasty. Enough trash (toilet-paper wads, ketchup packets, old write-ups, passes, whatever) to fill a dozen full-sized trash bags. And a love note to one of the jail’s prostitutes. He sold blowjobs for Snickers bars. Everyone called him Snickers. Even the superintendent. The opening line of the note: So you have Hep C, what else?

      Contraband includes any modified item or items in excess. I found a bag of forty oranges under a guy’s bunk. That was excess. He was going to make hooch (jail speak for jail wine). Extension cords are the most modified item in the jail. Inmates stick paper clips and disassembled nail clippers into the socket end. Anything metal works, the thicker the better. Plug it in and it’ll boil water instantly. It’s called a stinger. I found eight of them.

      THIS is why we confiscate any food taken from the dining hall: food poisoning, jail fauna, sour-milk bombs. Meat spoils—inmates didn’t have refrigerators. But they had roaches, field mice, and great aim when it came to throwing a two-week-old carton of curdled milk at the bubbles. The two big blocks (A and D, 450+ inmates each) got bombed the most. The bubbles were in the corner by the door. They had tin roofs and windows for shields, but the sour milk, the gag-able clear liquid part, ran and soaked into the metal seams and windowpanes and layers of paint. After a bomb was the only time those blocks didn’t smell like cigarettes and piss.

      THIS is how much all the dumb shit is worth: something. The entire jail economy was a barter system. A pound of sugar stolen from the chow hall might get a broke inmate two bags of chips and a bottle of instant coffee.

      The de facto jail currency was Kite, a pouch of roll-it-yourself tobacco, which cost about a dollar from the commissary. The pouches were green; inmates even called it money. A jailhouse tattoo gun, made from a Walkman’s innards, a guitar string, and tape, cost something like thirty Kite.

      Kite was the standard, but inmates hoarded everything. A few guys on each block ended up with forty rolls of toilet paper or three dozen blankets. Once a month, minimum, each block ran out of toilet paper. That was when the TP hoarders made their Kite.

      And each block had a couple of inmates who had a little extra of everything. Those guys ran stores from their cells. The markup was 25 percent. They sold three-dollar packs of batteries for four Kite. Businessmen, they called themselves. Or hustlers. A hustler would get an extra hat and trade it away for a bag of chips. Then the hustler who bought the hat would sell it for anything worth more than the chips. It didn’t matter how much he made—a ten-cent profit got the hat resold. That kept happening. The hat would be sold from hustler to hustler until it made it around the block and back to the guy who had it stolen from him in the first place. And he’d buy it back with one of the twelve dirty towels he had stolen from the laundry. All this, a hat hustler told me, passes the time.

      Some inmates who had nothing ended up working for others. Six soups (jail speak for ramen noodle packs) got you a haircut (five for the barber, one for the lookout), a Honey Bun got your laundry washed, an Oatmeal Cream Pie got your toilet scrubbed, and a Snickers bar, well, you already know what that got you.

      THIS is what some guards talked about to avoid the reality of stripping another man: sports. Weather. Parole-board dates. The latest staff member fired for bringing in implements of masturbation. How the jail used to be, you know, in the good old days before insurance copays and when the dining hall still served real steak. Small talk isn’t just for parties. Usually it’s one-sided. The guard does all the small-talking. Inmates thought it was weird—which it was.