I imagine every prison has a “lock-in-a-sock,” inmate-upon-inmate assault problem, but I’d wager that few have arrived at a mind-boggling solution quite as absurd as my “home” prison, SCI-Albion. Apparently, the most inventive minds in the bureaucratic hive labored mightily to deliver the following honey of a cure:
Last week, after our block was locked down, a voice on the loudspeaker announced that all combination locks were to be confiscated, replaced free of charge with two smaller locks—one to secure each inmate’s wall locker, and one for his footlocker, if he owned one. Although I owned one, filled with short stories, essays, memoirs, and rejection slips from literary quarterlies, I had never seen the need for locks. Nor had many of my fellows, who preferred to spend their dough on junk food or e-cigs.
After a conga line of CO’s, commissary workers, and a lone secretary from the front office was established at a row of dayroom tables, each inmate was summoned from his cell. When my turn came, I informed the CO that I had no locks to exchange. After signing a form attesting to that fact, I moved to the next table, where I was handed two metal combination locks—each one approximately half the size of the old ones, but together with its mate every bit as heavy as the now verboten ones. As I hefted their weight, I laughed out loud. “Hasn’t anyone noticed that two of these are just as heavy as the ones you’ve just seized?”
The nearest CO, visibly embarrassed, studied his paperwork, muttering, “Well, we think they will still prove less dangerous.”
Several inmates within earshot chuckled at his reply. “Right,” said I. “A rattlesnake is less deadly than, say, a cobra, but it will still put the old kibosh to your happy day, nevertheless.”
Upon delivering this unappreciated bon mot, I was ordered back to my cell, where I later realized that whereas maybe only 40% of us prisoners had possessed a lock before, now everyone had two, a prison-initiated escalation of arms comparable to seizing every single shot shotgun, only to replace them with double-barrel goose guns.
That evening, I recalled a similar incident several years earlier, when a guard at another prison was kicked to death by an inmate shod in Timberland boots. After a convocation of the Bureau of Correction’s wisest minds, which isn’t saying much, an edict ordering the immediate seizure of all Timberland boots statewide was handed down. Their owners could either donate them to charity, or have them shipped home, at the state’s expense, to their family. Meanwhile, every new prisoner continued to receive a pair of sturdy, lace-up work boots, each as potentially lethal as the banned Timberlands. Go figure, but take care not to become so involved in an unbalanceable equation that you become unbalanced yourself, which probably explains why the powers-that-be arrived at the two above solutions-that-weren’t.
My father, an otherwise intelligent and rational man, had an unreasonable fear of snakes, even harmless garter snakes and such. One day I was looking for something in his basement, when I noticed a coiled-up blacksnake perched upon a rafter cross-brace. Since the Good Lord has never created a more efficient mouser, I left it be. Lest my father burn down the house to get shut of it, I never told him of its presence. Now, years later, I feel like a snake in the rafters, my safety dependent upon the whims and vagaries of a gaggle of desk-bound functionaries with little-to-none firsthand experience with those, and their problems, whom they oversee. What next, I fret, will these masters of mediocrity deliver? The fire, next time?
The end
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