thousand inmates a year to be watched, restrained, taught, counseled, medically treated, fed, and circled at idle speed with loaded guns at all times. But the public, the other 12 million Pennsylvanians who aren’t doing time, don’t know a thing about them unless they’re on parole, or visiting Ricky, or breaking down in front of one only to be told to remain in their vehicle by a guard who smells like peanut butter.
After I left, Rockview’s administration shut down four of the five towers to save money. In response to the public’s concern, the assistant superintendent told a local reporter, “I don’t think the public understands what we have here because obviously no one comes here. We don’t allow the public to drive by and see exactly what we have.”
The public, for sure, doesn’t know. Jails are everywhere but nowhere. All the public sees of Rockview is a bunker surrounded by flowers, shrubs, fields, and the ancient ground-down Appalachian Mountains.
As a civilian you can look. Go ahead. But don’t stop.
And please leave.
The guard handbook warns, “Employes are prohibited from imparting information to ANYONE not attached to the Institution.”
And I never did.
Until I was not an employee anymore. My wife took a job that let me escape. We moved to rural Missouri and I stayed home with our son. Baby number two, our daughter, was on the way. One day I was in charge of two thousand convicted felons. The next, in charge of making grilled cheese. One of my wife’s colleagues asked, “What are you, a teacher or what?”
Nothing, was my answer. Which was a first. I had always been a something.
After a year I went back to school and took a writing class. The first essay was going to be about jail. But what came out was everything. So I kept writing—for ten years. It pulled me right back in. And I decided that the reason blue-collar workers don’t usually write books isn’t because they’re dumb or untalented—they’re just too damn tired. Energy is energy. It’s burned up circling a jail or writing chapters, and there’s a finite daily supply.
~
WHAT brought a picketer to Rockview was an upcoming execution. Her sign read, Stop The Massacre. I told her she could stand across the street. She told me, “I forgive you.” Then I circled for two hours, holding tight to the perimeter until my relief stepped from the control center. He was an oldhead (jail speak for old) guard. I gave him the guns and the goods: You good, oldhead?
“Good, young buck, real good. I hit the street in two months” (jail speak for he was going to retire).
At the time, that was my future speaking. It looked heavy.
He idled away.
I walked through the reinforced double doors, under the wire, between the motion sensors, and through the metal detector. The control sergeant asked me if the grandmother was hot (“Well, was she?”) then gave me my next assignment. “D block,” he said. “One of their guys went home sick.”
I walked through three more doors, then a gate, and saw a middle-aged inmate throw an empty milk carton on the sidewalk. I made him pick it up. He said, “You trippin’, CO.”
A young inmate sprinted past us. I stopped him and asked why he was running. “Gotta get that money.” Which sounded about right. He had a commissary pass. Inmates called all commissary items money.
I kicked on D block’s door. The block sergeant told me, “Showers, close ’em up.” So I assumed my position at the entrance to the showers. The shower room was 250 square feet of showerheads and soapy men. The steam wrinkled my uniform. The soap stung my nose. I called out, Ten minutes!
And Melvin, that notorious inmate, tiny in size, massive in character, called back, “Fuck yo ten minutes!” I hadn’t even noticed him in there.
A soapy man said, “Fucking Melvin.”
Another said, “Evil dwarf.”
An inmate by the door had a boot print tattoo on his back. And while I considered its meaning, I turned off the water and dared Melvin to turn it back on.
Melvin
ONE afternoon, years after leaving the jail, I watched my daughter play the video game Minecraft. It’s like digital Legos with people and zombies and animals. You can build the pyramids of Giza or the Eiffel Tower or a floating pink house made of wool. You can build anything. So what does she build? A jail, of course. And she says to me all sweet-like, “I’m going to do something very bad. I’m going to put babies in the jail.” Because you can do that too.
~
THIRD week postacademy I walked with an older guard. He said, “Today’s mission: get in, get out, get paid.” He used to be a landscaper. Did it until he hurt his back. He told me, “I can make a yard look good. The right length to cut grass is three and a quarter inches. Why not three? Why not four? Because grass don’t follow standard measurements. Grass follows grass.”
Four inmates in yellow jumpsuits walked out of the control center. Another guard escorted them. Yellow jumpsuits meant they were transfers. Standard uniforms were brown.
One of them, a minisized transfer, was four foot six at most. His jumpsuit was rolled up at the wrists and ankles.
“What,” the guard walking with me said. “The fuck is that? Is this juvie now? Day care? Babies ‘R’ Us?” He yelled to the small man, “Hey, babyGap, don’t I know you?!”
The tiny man, acting uninterested, looked at him and yelled back, “I fuck your mother?”
That ex-landscaper with something like ten years in jail stopped walking. I stopped too. Jail had me confused. It was full of violent stories like “That guy threw a dude off the top range last year over a bag of pork rinds,” and “That guy decapitated his victim,” and “That guy was a chiropractor who raped women coming in for job interviews.” Guards told me this while we walked around watching guys sleep all day. They didn’t look violent. Just tired. A double murderer told me politely on my second day, “Hey, CO, I’m the night-shift cook. Do you mind turning your radio down? I need my Zs. Otherwise chow will suck . . . more than usual.” Then he laughed. Me too. He seemed reasonable. But another guy mean-mugged me for walking in front of him at the mailbox. In his hand: a letter addressed to Mamma.
And here was the smallest inmate I had seen openly challenging somebody who had been wearing that uniform for over a decade.
The landscaper ran up to the small man and demanded his ID card, which he didn’t have—he had been in the jail all of twenty minutes. “Well,” Landscaper said. “Give me your name.”
“Melvin.”
“Melvin what?”
“Melvin nothing.”
“Melvin nothing?”
“Yeah, Melvin. My mother gave me Melvin. So I’m Melvin.”
The guard escorting the new inmates said, “His last name is Pang.”
Melvin said, “My hurters are called Pang.”
“What?” Landscaper asked.
“My hurters.”
“Your hurters?”
“My foster parents.”
Landscaper paused a long pause. Adjusted his hat. Then said, “Come see me some time, Pang, I work in the AC. You know what that is?”
Melvin said, “That’s not my name.”
“Administrative Custody, that’s the place they send dickheads.”
Landscaper veered off to the AC, the place for dickheads, and I kept walking to D block, my assignment for the shift. Melvin wore state-issue brown boots and a straight back. He walked with his chin unnaturally high.
~