PRISONER EXPRESS

A friend is being made into sausage. It is a slow process. It entails trips through two government bureaucracies and meetings with many government officials. Much paper is wasted, and the end result is always a final declaration of guilt.

The victim this time is Douglas Caldwell, referred to as "Elmo" by his friends. I forgot what he's in here for, but I remember that it was something petty & only worth about 5 years. He's on Oklahoma's criminal display net, probably as some kind of sneak thief. He's a little, agile guy, amusing to speak with and always in good humor. Though he's about 25, he's a bit of a juvenile. He's fairly acrobatic, walking on his hands, doing flying somersaults, and playing well at the usual sports. He's a fierce terrier, too. We were playing volleyball once when a big, yellow-toothed dogshit got hit with the ball (Eric Hartman): He cried about how he might throw the ball over the razor wire where nobody could get it. Elmo told this punk "You throw that ball over the fence and see what happens!" Yellowteeth changed his mind rather quickly, and then decided to no longer loiter in the danger zone, hoping to get hit.

Elmo didn't get much money sent to him by his family. He thus had to accumulate money in other ways. He fixed shoes for the other captives, did their laundry sometimes, worked as a bookie selling parade tickets for a small cut of the profits. He bought low and sold high whenever there was a margin on any bartering he could facilitate. There are numerous small ways for an active, friendly guy to make small change in prison.

Trouble is, small change doesn't go far when the cops & guards make a few crumbs of marijuana cost so dearly. Prison is deliberately made so extremely boring that men's minds and mental capacities actually shrink. This is not just some regular nonsense made up by anti-cage propagandists: This is irrefutable scientific fact known since the 1960's or earlier by virtually every learned member of academia. You take away stimuli, brain function diminishes, same as if you'd cut off a limb. Marijuana cuts the boredom and is thus slightly therapeutic against mental shrinkage due to the illegalization of most prisoner stimuli.

High demand. Short supply. The math said "Elmo, you need a higher rate of pay." So he traversed all the bureaucratic hoops necessary to obtain the highest pay grade possible. It took 6 months, and at the end he made $0.37/hr working at the shittiest job in the prison industrial areaâ€"spray painting metal and wooden objects on an assembly line. All of his considerable abilities at dexterity, endurance, willingness to do extra work better & faster than anyone else, plus his apparent sincerity in sucking up to the bosses and laughing with the guards as they denigrated him still didn't result in enough money to cover his needs. Price gouging ran rampant. The prison food was largely inedible to persons not raised in ghettos. Prison food is mostly variations on only a couple of themes. Ground guts stuffed in an intestine (special prison-made bolognas, salamis, sausages and dogs, all light on meat, heavy on gristle, cartilage, tendon and ligament) and ground guts concealed within gravy or a sticky, breaded husk, often itself hidden beneath gravy to discourage the curious from examining it. Garbage served as food forces men with weak stomachs to buy high-priced fast & junk foods from the guard-supplied stores. Also, there is a constant effort by politicians, cops, prisoncrats and the media whores to stampede ignorant, vengeful citizens into voting prisoners money into the pockets of politicians, cops, prisoncrats and victims. With so many hundreds of greedy fingers plucking at the money prisoners' families send, it is obvious that much of the prisoner economy would be driven underground.

This is exactly what Elmo had to participate in to avoid mental shrinkage, obtain some peace, and avoid the usual prison food ailments of diarrhea and colon cancer (from "tainted meats" and a lack of salad or fiber) and brain and bladder cancers (from artificial "fruit" drinks and a lack of citrus), to name only the most prevalent. Specifically, Elmo decided to become a smuggler. Even though there only averages about one "stabbing" per year at this prison, the sale of home-made "knives" is fairly lucrative. The H gangs (Indians, Hispanics, Negros & Caucasians) all greatly fear getting their just desserts for the crimes they pull on each other. Mostly they "buy" dope with a promise to pay, and then turn deadbeat when they perceive an opportunity to safely welsh on their debts. Dope-addicts tend to buy more dope rather than pay for dope previously consumed. Also they steal from each other when the opportunity presents, and they like to gather their "posses" and rob defenseless people. A 3rd popular gang activity is to simply brand individuals as snitches, baby-rapers and other incendiary terms and use these bald accusations as excuses to mob-up, beat the hated person senseless and of course, steal everything of value that he possesses. Then they go hide in their lairs and become very paranoid about their deeds, worrying mostly about the possibility of getting caught out sold by their victims. Hence the value of a collection of shiny, sharp, professional looking knives to brandish for protection and intimidation, rather than actual killing. (There hasn't been an inmate attack among Oklahoma's 24,000 prisoners that has resulted in an actual death for about two years. Also, no Oklahoma guards have ever been killed by a prisoner in 100 years of operation except for one named Cox in a 1978 escape from the Mealester chicken barn.)

A good knife smuggled in from the machine shop can sell for 25 $. Elmo successfully got one past the metal detecting wands. The "Nazi" gang paid quickly in cash. Then they ordered three more at wholesale prices, with promises to buy Elmo's entire production. They also offered Elmo sage advice on how to smuggle out three knives at once: "Just wrap them in special plastic!" (I was hoping that this is just a gossip-garbled, short-hand way of relaying something like, "you got to shrink-wrap it tightly to the inside of your thigh, high up in your crotch..." This way I could still have a bit of respect for the workings of Caucasian minds, however mal-educated they may be. Further investigation revealed similar nonsense being widely believed and touted as fact. It's as if these people stopped learning in 6th grade, then forgot everything down to the 4th grade! My research indicates two main causes for the stupidification of our youngest generations: TV crime dramas and a lack of school.

Anyway, Elmo got busted on his 2nd trip past the metal-detecting wands and was dragged off to deeper, more isolated cages for further societal exploitation. He will be assigned a lawyer who will conspire with judge/DA team to terrorize Elmo into accepting a "bargain" of 20 more years in prison in order to avoid a jury that would happily slam him with a life sentence for "smuggling contraband into a penal institution".

If, by some miracle, he has the courage and intelligence to dodge the deal which will triple of quadruple his original sentence (depending on if the judge/DA team has to illegally run it "concurrently" with his original sentence in order to get Elmo to accept it) Elmo still will suffer all the pitfalls of facing a jury. His "public defender" will manipulate him so that he does not even try to defend himself. He will be a passive, angry observer as the prosecutor terrorizes the jurors with fanciful tales of narrowly averted gruesome, bloody murders, gang wars, escape attempts, hostage-taking and guard killings. Not one word of the fact that this is hardly more than an economic crime will escape. No one will be told the fact that the primary use of the knives will be nothing more than to scare off other thugs. No one will profit but the courthouse crew and the prisoncrats who will make about 30,000 $ a year off Elmo fro an extremely long, unnecessary time. Lastly, all this will be gladly paid for by gullible, ignorant taxpayers who have not the slightest idea that they are being daily raped by the most colossal edifice of corrupt professional parasites ever to wear silk suits.