Editor’s Note: After the break begins the final installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which has run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Medical Block

I am on a top bunk in a four-man cell on the Medical Block at the Washtenaw County Jail and for the first time in my nearly five months here I can see clearly out a window. I gaze beyond the basketball court below, where my former colleagues from D Block exercise, and in the distance I see leaves turning color against the overcast sky. I am guessing that the slight breeze that blows the leaves is somewhat cool.

I have missed the summer. It was a hot one, according to the weather reports I’ve seen on TV. I wouldn’t know. I’ve only been outdoors about a half-dozen times since my ordeal began in late May. A hot summer is not the only thing I missed. I missed all four of my kids’ birthdays. But, on the bright side, I also missed $4-per-gallon gas prices.

I have about a week left until my “out” date, but I still cannot picture myself walking that yellow line from the inmate entrance to freedom. Looking out this window is the first hint I’ve had in many months that there is, indeed, a world outside these walls.

Myth of justice

Excerpts from a letter I wrote to my judge while in J Block:

Your Honor,

I recently submitted a work card for your consideration under the jail’s “earned release” program. As a followup, I wanted to update you on what I have accomplished so far during my stay here. I have been serving meals, cleaning the blocks, stripping paint, polishing door handles, among other duties. As I have mentioned in court appearances, I remain fearful for the welfare of my wife and children as they struggle to pay the mortgage and other bills while I am unable to earn a living from jail.

“… As you know, I have no previous criminal record, and my crime was the result of a unique event that will never be repeated, and for which I remain remorseful. I have never committed a violent act in my life and pose no threat to the community.

“I would like to request that you take these factors into consideration as you decide whether to release me back into my home and to my family. Thank you again for your consideration.”

Names are called for early release from the overcrowded jail. Drug dealers, spouse abusers go home. My name is not called. I remain.

My request was denied.

Why? I have my suspicions as to why, but none of it can be proven. Here’s what I think: Some “connected” people are making sure that I serve every … single … second … of my sentence. Sound like paranoid ranting? Five months ago, I would have thought so.

But my time in jail, getting to know the people and their stories, has taught me that there is no such thing as blind and fair justice. It is a myth, a fairy tale we tell ourselves – especially in the United States – to make ourselves feel good.

I think of the guy I met in J Block who killed somebody in a drunken driving accident. He got off with six months, admitting that it was the best lawyer his family’s money could buy that did the trick for him. I think of an old alcoholic I befriended in J Block who was jailed after he crashed his car with his favorite prostitute with him in the vehicle – “all my exes have infections,” he used to say, with apologies to George Strait. He was surprised he went to jail this time around. It’s not like the good ol’ days, he said, when his lawyer would grease the palms of the judge – or put in a word or two over a round of golf – and charges would magically go away.

This, at any rate, is what goes through my head after being imprisoned in this filthy pit for five months. I feel the anger, the resentment, even more now because I can feel the end coming. I have to learn to control these thoughts – otherwise my last week here will become as psychologically hellish as my first 56 hours back in the spring, when I was held illegally incommunicado in “suicide watch.”

To distract myself, I ask one of my three roommates if he’s up for another round of rummy. He says he is, and then begins the painstaking process of setting up a makeshift card table by stacking two plastic bins on top of one another. It is painful to watch because he does not have complete control over parts of his body. My rummy opponent has cerebral palsy. He’s the same guy I first saw months ago, half in tears and struggling to walk, in the visiting area.

I have been living on the Medical Block only a few days now, and already our games of rummy are beginning to become routine. There is a comfort in routine, but I know not to count on it in here. You’d think that spending months at a time in one spot would foster nothing but the same old routine, but interpersonal dynamics are always changing – indeed, the “vibe” of a block is always changing – as people come in and out. One day, you’re living with tolerable people and are having interesting conversations, playing cards, and the next you feel like you’re living in a motherfucking animal cage.

J Block

A few weeks ago, living in J Block, I thought I had a routine that would last until my “out” date. J Block was tolerable within an intolerable world. I had no idea why or how this would end for me, but it did.

I usually sat in a corner of the common room that many understood to be my “office.” People would approach me there and ask my advice on legal issues whose answers I was far from qualified to give, or if they wanted some point of trivia answered (“Hey, is the Panama Canal owned by China?”). Apparently, my rulings settled arguments. And business was booming. I wrote reports for two inmates’ “probation survival” classes in exchange for coffee. I’d given up on trading candy bars for my services. Candy bars gave fleeting pleasure. A bag of tuna satisfied my hunger and coffee satisfied my brain.

Not all my “deals” were in exchange for my writing services. For example, the old alcoholic I mentioned earlier had a habit of oversleeping right into roll call, when a few times a day we had to stand by our bunks and be counted. If you were not in position, you could be publicly ridiculed by the corrections officer, or worse, depending on who the officer was that day and what mood he or she was in. A few hours in the “sally port” was a possible punishment. The sally port is a small area between two doors at the entrance to J Block, where all you can do is sit on the floor or stand. So, I agreed to wake the old guy up five minutes before roll call in exchange for all the instant coffee I needed to keep my brain charged.

There was a kind of rhythm to life on J Block. There was a routine I could count on and, to some extent, take comfort in. Sometimes there’d be morning meditation. Some inmates mocked it. I enjoyed it, and I suspect that even some of the mockers secretly enjoyed it, as well – if only because of its novelty.

One day, I approached a corrections officer from the far right of the U-shaped desk. As soon as I spoke up, he quickly changed his computer screen from half-naked women to something more “work-appropriate.” As if I really cared what he stares at all day while he babysits us. He must have been annoyed that I interrupted … whatever he was doing, because my request for a new pair of slippers was denied. There was a crack in my current pair that kept digging into my feet. I simply waited a day until a different corrections officer was on duty. One phone call, and I got a new pair of footwear.

After breakfast, I would volunteer to serve breakfast in the other blocks. That lasted until my judge rejected my “earned release” petition. After that, I refused to supply the jail with my free labor.

During the day, I set up specific times to read, to write, to use the computers and use a “learn to type” program to increase my speed. Some fellow inmates seemed not to believe my typing speed until I explained that I did this for a living. Yeah. “Did” this for a living. What I would do after my release, I had no idea. Who would hire a convicted felon in a lousy economy?

On TV, we watch the Olympics. Women’s beach volleyball … of course.

Sit-com

I would play cards with a heavily tattooed man with bipolar disorder (under control through the magic of meds), who once worked in the kitchen as a jail “trustee.” He would talk about how they were encouraged to scrimp on portions. We made vague plans of launching a Web site to expose some of what goes on in jail. I would always bring up the subject of, “Who cares?” I still ask that question.

Sometimes, I would sit and listen to the rantings of a former Detroit firefighter who said he was serving a year in jail for pulling a gun on some of his son’s drug-dealer friends hanging around his property. I am not sure if that was the whole story, but I don’t question fellow inmates’ versions of events. He was a crotchety old racist white guy who railed against the hygienic habits of black inmates and blamed some vague Limbaugh-esque conspiracy of the “feminazi order” for his incarceration.

I would counter that there are just as many smelly white people in here who refused to take daily showers. And, I have learned, there is simply no arguing with a Rush Limbaugh fan, since any disagreement with them is proof in itself that you are the enemy. I listened with attentive amusement as he explained how the enforced “pussification” of men in our society has made it impossible for fathers to properly discipline their sons, thus leading to his own offspring’s association with drug dealers and my fellow inmate’s resulting incarceration.

For a while, I would talk to a guy nicknamed by another inmate as “Ice Cream Man” because he was jailed after getting drunk and breaking into an Ann Arbor Dairy Queen, apparently not stealing any money but perhaps helping himself to some of the product. Police had only found a half-full glass of beer at the scene. Ice Cream Man and I would talk about some of the interesting characters we’ve met so far and he suggested that somebody in Hollywood should produce a jail-themed situation comedy. Not a bad idea.

I made the mistake once of giving Ice Cream Man some free coffee because he begged me for it. He then begged me every single day, and I drew the line at that. After a few refusals, he stopped talking to me altogether and would give me disgusted looks every time he saw me.

There was a guy on my top bunk who slept most of the day and night. I finally asked him once how he could sleep so much. “Depression,” he said. I never learned his entire story, but he told me that he and his wife had a child who died and he was in jail as a result of that. I got the feeling that he never hurt his child, but he might have been incarcerated for hurting his wife.

Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories in jail are as rampant a virus as MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus). Among much of the African American population, it seems, it is not even a “theory” that AIDS is a man-made disease created in a lab. It is as established a fact as the wetness of water or the blueness of the sky. If I disagree, I get looks of pity, as if I am a poor, naive dupe who believes the lies the establishment tells me.

Of course, 9-11 conspiracy theories abound. One man, by far, took the prize in J Block when it came to spreading them around. A motivational speaker in his real life – and, apparently also a drug money launderer – he is very bright and convincing. We would get into many conversations about history and current events. To him, everything comes down to the old Freemasons conspiracy theory. He also believed, as did many “thinking” people on J Block, that the World Trade Center was destroyed by the United States government.

And, like Rush Limbaugh fans, any disagreement with the premise of a conspiracy theorist proves that you are either part of the conspiracy or are duped by it.

I told him that it is just as plausible that Panera Bread is responsible for 9-11, because stock in that company went up after the attacks – Americans wanted more “comfort food.” To me, the leaps of logic are not less plausible.

I did not think about it at the time, but I do now, sitting on my bunk in the medical block, waiting another week for my release. These conspiracy theories – AIDS as man-made disease, 9-11 perpetrated by the government, even the “feminazi order” – are all dearly held beliefs of much of the inmate population. These things make sense because – whether they are guilty of their crimes or not – there really was some kind of small or large “conspiracy” to take away their freedom. Some grew up with the assumption that the police and other authorities are brutal and the enemy, reinforced with bitter experience over the years – the latest of which is a “public defender” who did nothing to defend them.

And now, sitting in cells or on J Block with little contact with “reality” outside this world, it is easy to assume that the world of power continues to conspire against the powerless in unseen ways.

I think of my assumption that powerful and influential people had kept my name off the list for early release. I do truly believe that wealthy, connected people conspired to keep me in jail until the last possible second. Is this assumption of conspiracy any more sane than those of my colleagues? I suppose I cannot judge.

Block shuffle

At any rate, I knew that J Block was too good to last. One day, an officer read off a bunch of names and asked them to report to the sally port. I was among them. I was informed that there was some mistake, and I do not qualify to be in J Block. I almost laughed out loud at how ridiculous that was. I had never caused trouble, and in fact had gone out of my way to help my fellow inmates whenever possible, but apparently I was unfit to live among them.

I was shipped back to B Block again, which is the “intake” block. I spent about three days there, then was unexpectedly brought back to J Block for a week. Then, again, back to B Block. Long story short, there was a disagreement between two officers over which inmates qualify to live in J Block. Whichever officer was on my side apparently lost.

My time back in B Block was notable for one person I met. I’ll call him “Jim.” Jim was a homeless man who would have no place else to go if he were not in jail. I gave him free coffee, and he was my friend for life. He confirmed that status with me once, asking me: “Are you my friend?” I think he really wanted to know, since his conversations often went in and out of current reality. I said that yes, he is my “jail friend.” He seemed happy with that. He was so happy to get free coffee from me that he would make excuses to talk to me about the coffee. “Should I drink my coffee before lunch or after?” I told him that after would be fine.

Then, two weeks before my release, I was transferred here to Medical Block. I am not sick. There is simply no room anywhere else in the jail for me. A guy a few cells down, though, truly needed to be here. Both his arms are in casts. They were broken when police wrenched his hands behind his back during his arrest. Now, he cannot even wipe himself, and no officer will volunteer for that duty.

I almost “lost it” with a corrections officer over three hard-boiled eggs. I had been saving them from breakfast. The officer just took them away, saying we’re not allowed to save food. So, I’m going to bed hungry again. It put me in such a foul mood, it made my head spin.

I am playing rummy with my friend, the one with cerebral palsy. He is in jail because, according to the story he tells me, he had a fling with a woman who runs the homeless shelter where he stayed. The woman’s boyfriend did not like it and somehow got him thrown in jail on a trumped-up charge. I never question inmates’ versions of events. In jail, I simply accept people as they present themselves to me. There is an unspoken understanding that we all have our demons.

We are saddened that one of our roommates was taken away for calling a guard of Russian descent “comrade.” The guard was not amused. Before the incident, though, on some evenings he would ask our handicapped roommate to sing us a song. Tonight, after our rummy game, my friend with cerebral palsy sings without being prompted. The sounds from his voice, over which he sometimes does not have complete control, are melodic and strange. I cannot understand most of the words. It sounds alien, haunting in the receding light as it lulls me to sleep.

Out date

It is the evening before my “out date.” I can choose to leave the jail at midnight, as long as there is somebody there to pick me up, or be freed at 6 a.m. the next morning. I choose the next morning, since that is when my wife can pick me up.

At 6 a.m., a guard comes in and wakes me up.

“You ready to go home?”

“Yes, sir!”

The remainder of the author's jail account was $.26, returned on release in the form of a check.

I give the rest of my commissary food to my cellmates. I walk a little ahead, and to the right of the guard, who takes me down hallways and past the holding tanks where I began my stay five months and a lifetime ago and into the “property” room.

The officer hands me a bag containing the clothes I wore to court those five months ago. I put them on. They no longer fit. I have lost at least 20 pounds. My shoelaces are nowhere to be found. The guard finds some unclaimed shoelaces and hands them to me.

My hands shake a little as I try to lace up my shoes.

I am given back whatever was in my pocket when I was arrested – my keys, my wallet, some prescription medication. I am also given a check for the amount of money left in my jail account: 26 cents.

The officer leads me to the sliding glass doors and wishes me luck. I tell him that I will not be back. He gives me a bored “that’s what they all say” look.

The yellow line leads me from the garage, to a door, to a stairway, to another door that opens into a parking lot.

I emerge into a cool autumn morning.

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary.” All installments of the series can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 6: Home Stretch

-

Illness

God, I hope I never get sick in this place.

From my top bunk, I see about 12 corrections officers swarm like ants through Door 30 – the one that leads to J Block, where I’ve been transferred. A guy got sick and started throwing up. He approached the officer on duty and asked if he could go to the medical block. The officer disagreed and said he should go to Bam Bam for “observation.”

“You mean, go and wear a dress?” the inmate replied, with some panic in his voice.

I know from experience that the Velcro “dress” is only a surface discomfort when compared to the other horrors of Bam Bam – aka “checks,” aka “suicide watch.”

The officer told the increasingly agitated inmate to calm down. The inmate informed the officer that he would rather go to the medical block, where his illness might be better treated than if he were in the Bam Bam holding tank. But he said so in an animated way that apparently rubbed the officer the wrong way.

Backup was called.

Now, about a dozen officers enter the block, but only a couple of them participate in subduing the inmate. They slam the sick guy against the curved counter at the center of J Block, ‘cuff him behind his back and drag him away.

I suppose it’s good that the man has been removed from my block. But instead of potentially infecting 60 people in a large room, he’ll potentially infect about 10 people packed inside the Bam Bam tank. They’re brilliant over here.

J Block is designated a “therapeutic block.” I am not entirely clear on what that means – it has something to do with a focus on the well-being and rehabilitation of inmates. But it seems that whether the block is true to its name, and goals, depends on what officer is on duty.

There’s one officer I can think of who might have made things turn out differently for my sick colleague.

The yellow line

It’s morning on J Block, just after breakfast. “See yourself floating, floating out of your bunks, hovering in this room, over my desk, then right through Door 30 and out of J Block,” says the corrections officer. Soft, New Age type music plays in the background.

“See yourself floating down the corridor, flying past the holding tanks, then out the glass sliding doors. Now, you’re hovering above that yellow line, following it to freedom.”

Afterward, I approach the corrections officer and say that I did not make it past Door 30 in the meditation. I know when my “out date” is, but I still just cannot picture myself actually leaving the jail and following the yellow line.

The officer tells me that the meditation exercise is not necessarily about physically leaving the jail. It’s about “having a plan” for when you get out. Once you do find the yellow line, once you do leave these walls, then what? What are you going to do to keep yourself from coming right back to jail?

The officer is right. I have, at best, a nebulous plan that involves making things better with my wife and somehow finding employment in a bad economy that has gotten worse during my incarceration, and slowly recovering from the psychological trauma of jail.

Perhaps I cannot picture following the yellow line, cannot come up with a more specific plan, because I am too wrapped up in the world within these doors. My world is now small, I think, and so am I.

The Henchman

It is my first week on J Block and I hop into the shower. There are three shower heads, so I think nothing of going into the shower area when there is another man in there. It’s not that I forget where I am – I never forget I am in jail – it’s simply that I put myself in the wrong frame of mind. High school gym class? A health club? I don’t know. No thought went into it.

I shower. I leave. I forget about it.

One of my blockmates is an Arab man who is the scion of a prominent family of retail owners. He is in jail for setting a couch on fire, I am told. I will call him Ishmael.

Ishmael appears to be everybody’s chum. He is not a leader, himself, but can usually be seen by the side of those on the block with strong personalities. He’s a “yes” man. Or, if this were an old movie or a cartoon (which at times I feel it can be), Ishmael would be cast as the bad guy’s henchman.

Ishmael, clearly in his henchman role, approaches me and says that Malcolm wants to see me in the TV area.

Malcolm is a drug dealer. And, if stories are to believed, a very successful and prosperous one. I am calling him Malcolm here simply because he reminds me of a black version of Malcolm McDowell’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” He speaks calmly, rationally, friendly, yet holds himself slightly aloof and apart from the rest of the group. Like a leader. He looks like he’d shake your hand and pat you on the back as a friend one second and would not hesitate to stab you in the gut the next. Hats, of course, are not allowed in jail. But I picture him with a bowler. I don’t know why.

Malcolm can always be found in the TV area, where DVDs are playing (a special privilege of J Blockers). There is a kind of “drug dealers row” permanently planted in front of the TV, where they swap stories and have one movie playing in a seemingly endless loop. That movie is, of course, “Scarface.”

Ishmael instructs me to sit down across from Malcolm, who is surrounded by various other henchmen – one of them an older man in his 60s who does a great deal of nodding in agreement.

I am still unclear on what this “meeting” is all about. I find it wise, however, to sit down and hear them out. I sit across from Malcolm, but it is Ishmael who does all the talking. Apparently, aside from being a henchman, Ishmael is also Malcolm’s official spokesman on this matter.

Ishmael is usually the class clown. He’s known for throwing pieces of candy at the heads of blockmates. He has the candy to spare. His family apparently keeps his jail bank account well-stocked. But for this occasion, Ish contorts his face into one that mimics what he believes should be grown-up, mature seriousness. His expression almost makes me want to laugh. When he speaks, he talks to me as if he’s speaking to a child.

“Look, we really don’t care about your sexual preferences. We don’t. Whatever. But, the thing is, you stepped over a line when you invaded my man Malcolm’s shower space …”

The realization hits me at once, and I start mentally “kicking” myself for my stupidity. Yes, of course, Malcolm was the other guy in the shower. I immediately understand how I have violated jail protocol. I knew when I first entered jail that I would end up pissing somebody off without even knowing it. I’ve finally done it. I wonder what the punishment is for such a crime.

Malcolm does not speak to me. He looks away, looks aloof.

The old guy nods.

“Shit,” I say. “You know, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But, you know, there are three shower heads in there, so I just assumed … um … assumed wrongly …”

“Three shower heads, but only one guy showers at a time,” Ishmael says.

The old guy nods.

“Well, Malcolm,” I say, ignoring the henchman and addressing the aggrieved party directly. “Next time I take a shower with another person, it will be with MY WIFE. Just the other day, I was telling MY WIFE how much I’d love to take a shower with HER. I’ve written letters to MY WIFE fantasizing about HER in the shower. In fact, I am saving all future showers for MY WIFE as soon as I get out of here …”

I jabber on in that mode.

The old guy nods.

Malcolm looks at me with a blank expression on his face for about five seconds. Then he cracks a wide grin. “You’re OK, man.” He reaches out his hand and we shake. I smile, relieved that the crisis had been defused.

The old guy nods.

Drug dealers row then moves on to other topics of conversation.

They speak of a couple of customers they all know. Their names are Grace and Joy, and they are twin blondes who live in a trailer park. The gentlemen of dealers row talk about them, as they talk about all their customers, with disdain. One of them launches into an imitation of Grace, or Joy: “I’ll suck your dick for a hit,” he says in a high-pitched voice. “And I said, ‘Bitch, put that pipe down …’”

What I gather from the conversation is that the good drug dealers do not touch the stuff, themselves, and have no respect for their customers.

At one time, another guy listening in on the conversation makes a crack about “having a little Grace and Joy in your life.”

I laugh, apparently too loudly.

Ishmael is trying to watch “Scarface” and my laugh must have drowned out some key piece of dialogue. He turns around, faces me and says loudly for all to hear, “Shut up, faggot.”

Dozens of inmates turn around, look at me and laugh.

Now, my gut tells me that the situation has not been defused after all.

Here is where the Bizarro world of the incarcerated takes on an internal logic that makes the head spin. If this were the “real world,” I would have laughed off the junior-high-school epithet. In jail, though, a couple of disturbing things enter my mind. I feel I cannot be made a fool of in front of other inmates, who would then consider me weak and victim material.

In the “real world,” I am not the slightest bit homophobic. But in jail, gay men can be victimized. The “shower misunderstanding” has already made its way around the block, despite Malcolm’s willingness to forget about it. Now, the public accusation that I am a “faggot” takes that misunderstanding and turns it into a very public joke at my expense.

Strange. In the “real world,” I would not even care if there were some misunderstanding about my sexual orientation. In here, I feel like there could be potentially dangerous consequences if I let this taunt go unchallenged.

It is in this frame of mind, within the twists and turns of this internal logic, that I decide to do something very out-of-character for me.

I wait until it is time for us all go back to the bunk area to be counted. Ishmael has a bottom bunk across the aisle from me. I wait until he is lying down, so I can appear larger than I am, looming over him. I hover over him, look him straight in the eyes and say, just loud enough so that a few people to our left and right can hear, “Don’t ever call me a fucking faggot again.”

Ishmael’s eyes get very wide, and he jerks to a sitting position. “OK. OK. Fine. Just get the fuck away from me.”

Ish and I do not speak to one another the rest of my time in J Block. Nothing more is ever said of the misunderstanding over my sexual orientation. I learn later that Ishmael told others that I looked crazy and scared the shit out of him.

Mission accomplished.

Death

One day, with about two months left in my sentence, we are out mingling in the large common area of J Block, when the officer on duty announces that we are all “locked down” in the bunk area for the foreseeable future. It’s nothing we’ve done wrong, he explains. There was an incident elsewhere in the jail, so everybody’s being locked down for a while. None of it really matters to me. I just lay on my bunk and read, or write.

The next day, I am out pushing carts, serving meals to the other blocks. I do this work in hopes of an early release as a part of the jail’s “earned release” program.

I actually enjoy this work. A kind word here or there, and fellow inmates react with pleasant surprise. “How ya doin’? Ya’all right?” Sometimes, I am asked to deliver messages to inmates in other parts of the jail. I do this as discretion allows.

There is one man who I always see on his knees, praying. He accidentally killed a man in a fight and will likely go to prison for a long time. Every time I serve a meal to him, I catch him in the prayer position. I think he might spend much of his day this way.

I casually ask an officer why the jail was locked down yesterday. I have already heard the rumors that a man had died near the booking area. The officer smirks and says that he can “neither confirm nor deny” any jailhouse rumors.

Another few days go by. I think very little of the incident. Then, I hear more rumors that grow more and more disturbing to me every day. They disturb me because they strangely parallel my own story. Here is what I have heard from various sources.

A detainee is in Bam Bam just as I was. And, like me, he is denied his right to a phone call. Like me, he gets very agitated about being denied contact with the outside world. Unlike me, however, his agitation gets physical. He is removed from Bam Bam and taken to one of the solitary confinement cells. There, according to the official story, he somehow manages to wrap a towel around his neck and the toilet, suffocating himself. According to jailhouse rumor, the man was killed by officers going too wild with their tasers.

I have served meals to the men in solitary, and have spoken to others who have been in those cells. It would take some considerable skill – and perhaps some defiance of the laws of physics – to suffocate yourself with a towel wrapped around the base of a toilet. As soon as your grip lets up, wouldn’t the towel loosen? Perhaps not if it’s wet, I suppose. I just don’t know.

These rumors, in themselves, are only a passing curiosity to me, really, until J Block starts buzzing again with another rumor. An inmate had stood up in an Alcoholics Anonymous class and spilled his guts about much more than his struggles with alcohol.

Here is what I heard, from multiple sources who were in that AA class. The inmate had been in a nearby solitary confinement cell at the time of the “suicide.” After the incident, he and the others who were in solitary were approached by officers, who offered them early release in return for their silence on what they had heard the day of the incident.

I learn that the inmate who gave the AA testimony is now in E Block, but will likely go free soon. A number of my fellow inmates urge me to speak to him and get the truth – they know that I plan to write about my experiences in jail. One of the J Block cart pushers who serves E Block told me that he would gladly let me take his place, so that I could talk to the man who had spoken up at AA.

I agree to take his place. I even prepare to sneak a pen out of the block so I can take notes as I talk to him – if I can do it while the guard is not looking.

Then, for reasons I still do not understand more than a year later now, I change my mind. I never go to E Block. I never speak to the inmate. I tell myself that I just do not care about this “story.” I am worried about myself, and only myself.

I am in the home stretch of my own sentence, and simply do not want to risk getting caught and making things worse for myself. Looking back now, I cannot see how things could have gotten worse for me, anyway. But I was not only physically in jail, I was emotionally there, too, and my own survival instincts trumped my instincts as a writer.

It could very well be that the AA guy was lying, or that the rumors of what he said were not true, or any one of a number of things that would have contradicted the story. Maybe the guy really did commit suicide. But I might have been able to determine what was true and what was not through a short conversation with the inmate.

Today, I regret not getting closer to the real story. And the trail is cold.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 5: D-Block

“Jalapeno hot dog poppers,” says a man I will call “Zeke,” a very big grin on his very big face. Then he slaps down his cards in an exaggerated motion. Zeke and I, along with a few others on the block, are playing rummy.

Zeke is the large African American man I first saw when I entered D-Block, when I spouted out “Jeopardy” answers. His huge size, his trancelike gaze at the television, combined to give me a false first impression of the man as dull and dull-witted. Turns out, Zeke is none of the above.

He is in jail for credit card fraud, the extent of which I do not ask. He does, however, tell me the secret to obtaining the PIN from a lost or stolen debit card. I have not put that knowledge to use.

But Zeke is determined to make a new start for the sake of his many children and “baby mamas” awaiting him after he serves his sentence. Zeke loves food. Zeke is all about food. Zeke dreams and schemes ways of obtaining more food while in jail, and making a legitimate living in the food industry once he is released.

And, at random times during our “out” times in D-Block, Zeke will blurt out his ideas for new food combinations to sell.

“Jalapeno hot dog poppers,” Zeke repeats.

“Not for me,” I reply, snapping my own cards on the table. Another inmate, a Hispanic man, said that he’d try them. He, too, slaps his cards down. If you jump up and slam them down just right, the sound echoes up and down the block.

Zeke’s ideas are rarely appetizing to me, but the man does get me thinking more about the food served in jail.

The size of the food portions served by the Washtenaw County Jail seem to be part of a scam. They are not enough to feed a grown man. The small portions force inmates to buy food at the commissary for exorbitant prices.

I will later meet an inmate who worked in the kitchen. He will confirm that they are encouraged to give inmates less food per tray than recommended. The “store lady” who takes commissary orders will disappear, prompting speculation among inmates that she had been fired for taking pity on some inmates by slipping them free food.

As soon as I get over the pure disgust of jail food, I begin to crave it more and more. I dream of food. I dream of taking odysseys on “elevators” that fly horizontally over the ruins of my dream city – like the glass elevator in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” – taking detours into wrecked shopping malls, dipping into stores that contain free samples of food that I scoop up and gorge upon.

“Ice cream burritos,” Zeke says.

“Do you mean actual burritos filled with ice cream?” I ask. “Or ice cream in the shape of burritos?”

“Either one,” Zeke says.

“I’d go for either one,” I say, feeling charitable.

Later, when I find out how he’s getting extra food to maintain his extra weight, I will feel much less charitable toward Zeke.

Suicide is painless

We are playing cards on the picnic-style table on the block’s main floor. Above us, I hear a familiar “joke” from one of the men still locked down on the upper tier. “I’m not supposed to be here!” he cries. A few chuckles can be heard. It’s an old joke I’ve heard since Day One in Bam Bam (“suicide watch”). I think it’s a variation of the mantra, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” from the movie “Clerks.” It never fails to get some kind of laugh in jail – mostly from white inmates.

Then, the Russian guy comes out of his cell, bleeding from his freshly slashed arms.

What he used to cut his arms so badly, I have no idea. “Vlad” claims he has no idea, either. He just woke up, and there they were.

Seeing the slashes on Vlad’s arms makes me think of the Mexican man who was on D-Block briefly a few weeks ago. He spoke little or no English. The Hispanic man I play cards with served as interpreter.

But, one day, the Mexican man made a gesture that needed no translation. He stood on the upper-tier balcony, pointed to the railing and then pantomimed making a noose and wrapping it around his neck.

He was carted off to Bam Bam.

Knowing what Bam Bam is like, I cannot imagine that he will find it more tolerable than life on D-Block.

Vlad is a different case entirely. He speaks English very well. And never tires of using it. Ever. He talks a great deal. Vlad is quite proud of the fact that he was born in Russia. No matter what the topic of conversation, Vlad always manages to bring it all back to Mother Russia. He is a bore who lies so easily and obviously that I am not certain even he can tell the difference between fact and fiction. Vlad claims to be a direct descendant of Lenin and to be the son of a Russian Mafia boss.

Well, now he walks out of his cell with bloody slashes all up and down his arm. He says he must have done it in his sleep.

Vlad, too, is taken directly to Bam Bam.

And, speaking of Bam Bam, I have so far been evaluated – or, at least questioned – by a community mental health worker, a medical student and a psychiatrist in the past week or so. They all confirmed that they, too, believe that Washtenaw County’s Jail’s “suicide watch” – Bam Bam – is inhumane.

I related to one of them how I believe that Bam Bam actually encourages suicide because of the hopelessness and helplessness one feels packed inside that tank, along with corrections officers who are not authorized to give you any real information, so what they do say comes off as mockery and lies.

When I told one mental health worker that “suicide watch” is a place that encourages suicide, it elicited a little chuckle.

Grisham and Zeke’s meal deal

There is an 18-year-old kid on D-Block who recently found out that his juvenile record does, indeed, count against him when it comes to sentencing as an adult. I am not certain what crime he is accused of committing, but he is extremely worried that he could go to prison for years for what he describes as a recent minor offense.

He and I share a love of books, so we pass ours back and forth as we finish them. I cannot, however, share his passion for John Grisham legal thrillers, although I read them anyway just to pass the time. Reading a Grisham novel from jail is the equivalent, I believe, of watching “Cops” or any of the daytime courtroom series from your cell – which many inmates do religiously. Strange days indeed.

The kid, who I shudder to think is only a year older than my oldest daughter, seems to be passionate about Grisham, so I will call him “Grisham” here.

I am noticing that Grisham is getting thinner and appears weaker and weaker every day. I ask him if everything is OK. Grisham says he is fine, but hungry. I toss him an orange I’d been hoarding. Shakedowns are coming again soon, anyway, so the fruit will likely be confiscated. I ask why he’s so incredibly hungry.

Grisham motions his weak head over toward big, big Zeke. Grisham explains to me that when he first entered the block, Zeke took him under his very large wing and helped him get some questions answered. Grisham was too afraid of approaching the corrections officers with questions, so Zeke did it for him … for a price. The price was two food trays per day for 14 days. Lunch and dinner. Grisham had been eating only breakfasts for about a week and a half.

Another inmate next to us overhears Grisham’s explanation and is at once outraged that this kid is being taken advantage of in this way. It explains why Zeke does not seem to have lost any weight in jail, while Grisham’s face seems sunken. The outraged inmate secretly sends a “kite” to the authorities. A “kite” is what they call an inmate’s note that can travel – with CO approval – to various departments in the jail.

The next day, a corrections officer abruptly puts an end to the meal-tray deal between Zeke and Grisham. Zeke is mad. Very mad. And so he blames the only person he figured could have done such a despicable thing as deprive him of food: “Ho-Ass Bitch,” the “snitch” of D-Block.

“Ho-Ass Bitch” is no longer in protective custody, so he goes outside with the rest of us for exercise at an outdoor basketball court in an interior courtyard, where Zeke and he exchange some very heated words.

I point this altercation out to the real “snitch” in this case. He looks mildly amused.

All this intrigue is caused simply by not feeding inmates proper meals, leaving them to their own devices to figure out how to plot, scheme, hoard and steal their way to full stomachs. I wonder how much Washtenaw County is really saving by withholding proper amounts of food to inmates. I cannot believe that is it that much. I think it has more to do with the fact that the company that supplies the food to the inmates is also the company that runs the commissary. It is a great scam perpetrated against literally captive victims.

Zeke, of course, recovers from the setback and, I am certain, finds other ways of obtaining the food he needs to maintain his size. I occasionally share my food with him, too. I figure, in jail, it does not hurt to have a large man indebted to you in some way.

My disgust with Zeke taking advantage of little Grisham does not last long. I do not need to look very hard around me to remember that I am in jail. To some extent, there is a kind of “honor among thieves” that moves purely on the currents of its own internal logic. Forget about the fact that the Grisham-Zeke deal took advantage of a weak boy. Grisham honored his deal with Zeke until the authorities forced him to end it.

Seroquel

This “honor” system between inmates, though, is far from universal. I will discover that later, when I witness a Seroquel deal fall through. Seroquel is a drug for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that has a side effect much-sought-after among inmates: It can make you sleep for days and days at a time. Those jailhouse psych patients on the drug who have a little entrepreneurial spirit, and are good at pretending to swallow the pill in front of the nurses, can expect to make quite a bit of profit off Seroquel’s sale and resale value. However, in the broken deal I witnessed, the drug failed to produce sleep, according to the customer, and the dealer was not paid.

Cookup

Big Zeke does introduce me to that staple of culinary jail life: the “cookup.” It is usually based on food pooled together by two or more inmates, using Ramen noodles as a base. Ingredients such as tuna, sausages or even ground-up Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are added to taste. “Cookup” ingredients are dumped in a garbage bag, mixed together and enjoyed in the company of your colleagues. Them’s good eatin’s.

Normalcy

My life on D-Block following my final sentencing by my judge takes on an air of almost normalcy. Now that the suspense is over, and I have an actual “out date” to look forward to, the sense of urgency to my incarceration has gone away. I now know what I am dealing with, more or less, and now I attempt to fill my days with mental, physical and community activities just to keep myself from spiraling into depression or to think too hard about the family fending for themselves on the outside. If I think too hard and deep about my wife and children, I can easily slide back into deep distress and hopelessness.

We write one another and call whenever possible – although the Evercom long distance service used by the jail charges my wife exorbitant fees to accept collect calls from me. She visits me weekly whenever she can fit it in – although the demands on her are great, handling the children alone. Slowly, we move away from the idea of “divorce papers in jail” – as she told me on her first visit – to some sense that we will try to pick everything up where we left off once I am released.

Alone in my cell, I keep myself occupied with books, with writing, some exercise and a deck of cards.

Transfer

Every now and then, I hear something about an area of the jail they call J-Block. It is where about 60 inmates are housed in a large, communal room with a bunk area. No more 19.5 hours a day in a cell. There is access to computers, to a microwave oven, to a DVD player. One by one, I see my blockmates on D-Block being transferred there after their final sentences are established. It is now a few weeks after my final court appearance. I wonder why I have not been allowed to emigrate, as well.

So, I get up the courage to interrupt a corrections officer sitting behind his desk watching YouTube. As far as I can tell, by the way, this is a large part of what corrections officers do for a living – sit behind desks at their stations and pretend to “work” while watching YouTube. I ask him if I could be transferred to J-Block. He glances at me in that bored way that corrections officers have when they decide to look at an inmate. Then he says he’ll see what he can do.

A few hours later, to my astonishment, he tells me to pack up my stuff and get ready to move to J-Block.

I have no idea what to expect, but any change sounds like a good change to me. So, I pack up immediately, and nervously pace around my cell until after dinner, when I make the move.

It is in J-Block where I will feel, at least, like I am being treated like a human being. It is also on J-Block where I will make a few very serious blunders in relations with my fellow inmates, one where I will need to step out of character for me and assert myself in ways I had never thought possible.

And it is in J-Block where I will face a moral test: A fellow inmate will die.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 4: Court

It is after the tsunami and I am wandering amid the ruins of the city. There is some rebuilding going on and I am in a cavernous construction site. I walk among debris of crumbled skyscrapers, then into underground tunnels that smell of fresh sawdust from new wood beams shoring up the walls.

I glimpse a familiar face in the distance. It is a reporter from the Detroit TV station where I used to work. I call out to him, tell him that I have a story he might be interested in, that the Washtenaw County Jail holds some inmates under inhumane conditions.

But the reporter hops on a bicycle and speeds away. Not interested. I try to follow, dodging the debris of destruction and construction, but I cannot catch up with the bike. In the distance, I hear the chains on his bike clatter. Far off, he turns around and shouts in a voice that echoes: “Breakfast!”

Pre-Court Roundup for Transport

I awake in my cell to the clatter of the meal cart entering D Block. The officer on duty again shouts: “Breakfast!”

I will not eat any of it. My stomach is beyond butterflies, more like a squadron of fighter jets. I will go to court today and now I feel tense beyond reason.

Everybody who is going to court is taken to Holding 2. I hear the familiar, yet frightening shout of the officer, “Break 2!” The door to the holding cell slides open and I step inside.

The holding tank is jam packed with inmates. There is no room to sit. Over the course of an hour or so, officers open the doors and call out names of inmates.

I hear my name and line up to be handcuffed, placed in leg irons and shackled to fellow inmates.

We are stuffed into a police van separated by a metal wall into two sections. About six men slide onto a bench on one side and a couple of female inmates sit on the other side of the partition.

“After court, I’m gettin’ out dis bitch and following the yellow line,” says the man next to me.

As we pull out of the garage, I see from the back window a yellow line that leads from the sliding doors of the jail’s inmate entrance, then disappears into a doorway. I assume, based on my colleague’s comment, that when I am released from jail, I will follow that yellow line to freedom. From the vantage point of the back of a police van, handcuffed, shackled and in leg irons, that day seems very far off indeed.

I think of that tired, old phrase that I have heard often enough in the real world, but is an especially rampant virus in jail: “It’s all good.”

When you are powerless, when your fate is in the hands of others, I can see how easy it would be to either turn to religion – which often happens in jail – or to simply shrug your shoulders and leave it all in the random hands of “fate.”

“It’s all good.” When the assumption is that all things that do happen should happen, then, yes, all things are good. What, after all, is to be done about anything when you stand in chains before a judge who holds your misery or happiness in his hands? You simply wait for your turn.

The van parks at the courthouse near a special entrance for prisoners. We waddle out of the van, being careful not to trip over our leg irons as we step down. One fall would cause a domino effect among the fellow inmates to whom we are chained. We walk down a flight of stairs, enter a basement entrance to the courthouse, then down some corridors damp from leaking pipes. We climb a series of flights of stairs until we come to the courtroom’s holding tank.

We are unshackled from one another, but our handcuffs and leg irons remain on. The guard shuts the door, and here I wait with about a dozen or so others.

I have so far been inside many types of holding tanks, but the one that holds inmates at the courthouse has a different sort of atmosphere. There is more nervous pacing, more nervous chatter as each awaits his turn for something … finally something … to happen. A few inmates sit sullenly in the corner. Others return from the courtroom in tears. The place smells of stress and fear.

Every once in a while, a lawyer or assistant makes an appearance. Some inmates stand up, their ‘cuffed hands outstretched toward the bars, trying to get the lawyer’s attention like citizens of a famine-starved country, arms stretched out to receive food aid. For some, it might be the first time they’ve ever met their lawyer or public defender.

Many are presented important choices that need to be made right away. These choices are based on horse trading that has already gone on between prosecutors and defense attorneys. Make a deal or go to trial. Admit your guilt and more-severe charges will be dropped. Plead guilty and serve a year in County. Insist on your innocence, go to trial and, if found guilty, serve 20 years in prison.

I often wonder how many innocent men decide not to take the gamble of going to trial.

Jury of Peers

Young Guy: (Reading a piece of paper in his hand). What’s a jury trial?

Older Guy: That’s where they get 12 motherfuckers to decide if you’re guilty or innocent.

YG: Who are the 12 motherfuckers?

OG: Your peers. Just people.

YG: Where do they get them 12 motherfuckers? Just grab them off the street?

OG: Yeah. Well, no, they call them or something.

YG: I don’t understand. What’s the judge for if them 12 motherfuckers hear your case?

Shpiderman

There is a tall, older man in the holding tank who, during the course of conversation, informs us that he has only one lung and cannot move around very well due to injuries he suffered during the first Gulf War. He speaks like a gangster. Not the inner-city gangster of today, but the old-old-school type of the James Cagney variety. He speaks in nasal tones out of the side of his mouth. /s/ becomes /sh/.

He is talking about his case. He is accused of, among other things, climbing onto a third-floor balcony to steal something. The man gestures to his own wrecked body and says, “I’m a fucking cripple. Do dey really think I could climb up tree floorsh like fucking Shpiderman, shteal a purse, then jump back down?” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head. He will repeat his “Shpiderman” story often.

Shedding Fear

In the holding cell with me is a huge brick of a man – all muscle. The kind of guy who you would picture being escorted by three officers, guns drawn. He looks like he could crush me in a wink and never skip a breath, like a heavyweight boxer.

The Boxer shakes his head slowly as he listens to a couple of young men posturing over who they will get even with as soon as they are let free. The Boxer says they are all talk. Shpiderman agrees.

“Shend them to Iraq and let ‘em meet them Arab motherfuckersh and they’ll be pishing their pantsh,” Shpiderman says. The Boxer laughs in agreement.

The Boxer notices me sulking in a corner. He asks me what I’m here for. I usually stay vague if somebody asks about my crime. But there is an air of authority about The Boxer that makes me want to obey … if I know what’s good for me. So, I tell him my story.

He finds fault not with my crime, but with the way I tell it. In relating the story of how I ended up in jail, I am quick to concede points to others, to admit my fault where there may be a gray area of misunderstanding. The Boxer looks angry at me – but not for any perceived disrespect for him, or because of the nature of my crime. He’s mad because I am “disrespecting myself.”

This is not the way The Boxer lives his life. There is no self-doubt. Whether or not an action (a punch?) is poorly timed, or the wrong decision, it does not matter. The fact that the decision was made is an exclamation point in itself. Never, ever concede that your opponent has a point. Not to yourself, and certainly not out loud to others.

The Boxer has me repeat the story, only this time not admit any fault of my own. Ever.

It has me thinking. There are no factual differences between the two stories I tell him. But, in the second version, I left out phrases like “… and then I did something stupid …”

No, The Boxer indicates. What happened, happened. I “punched.” I acted. I did what I did for better or worse. But to look back with regret and self-flagellation, that is for the timid.

There are many things wrong with this point of view. It really is a variation of, “It’s all good.” But The Boxer’s talk helps me prepare for whatever comes next. It makes me more sure of myself in an environment where it is dangerous to show weakness. It makes me less depressed about past actions, in a place where there is no undoing the past and nothing to be done about the present. Most of all, The Boxer is helping me shed fear – that killer of the spirit. I take heart from that lesson as I await my appearance before the judge.

And I continue to learn from it more than a year later. Today, I am not where The Boxer would have liked to have seen me go. I do regret the past, I am anxious about the present, I do fret about the future. However, since my talk with The Boxer, since jail, since these holding tanks, since these long nervous waits in shackles to appear before a judge, I have shed my fear.

The Deal

Another man with whom I share a holding cell has a different answer for me. He asks me what my possible sentence will be. I say, “If there’s a God in heaven, the best I can hope for is six months.” I mean this as simply an expression of a fate that is out of my control – with no real religious meaning behind it. Understandably, though, my cellmate takes me for a religious man. He replies, “There is a God in heaven.” Then he bows his head, closes his eyes and says, “Let us pray.”

I remain politely silent as he prays, presumably for himself and for me, but do not join. I grew up Jewish and remain so, culturally, but God and I have had a rocky relationship for a number of years now and I have been making a conscious attempt not to succumb to the cliche of the “jailhouse conversion.”

A young woman walks into the holding tank. It is one of the public defender’s helpers. She talks to me about “the deal.” It is time for me to make a big decision.

I have already decided not to go to trial for various reasons, including a desire to spare my family embarrassment and to end this ordeal as soon as possible. I have already pleaded guilty. “No contest” was not an option (“Not in my court,” the judge had said). It has taken about four previous court appearances before two separate judges to make it to this point – my sentencing.

About a month ago, at my pretrial hearing, the victims of my alleged crime did not actually need to be in the courtroom. Instead, they were placed in a special chamber.

Since I had decided to “make a deal” and plead guilty, there is nothing in the official record in my defense. Evidence was cherry-picked to present me in the worst possible light, and that is all the judge saw.

It all served to intimidate my Public Pretender. Or, at the very least, convince him that this case is going to be more trouble than it’s worth and we’d better make a deal. No defense was ever offered. In essence, I had nobody to speak on my behalf to counter the specific allegations against me. That’s what happens when you “make a deal” and plead guilty. Only the allegations become the “permanent record.”

At the pretrial, I had wobbled out of the smelly cage, and into the jarringly different world of the quiet courtroom. The only sound was the gasp of my wife’s friend at seeing me in my jail jumpsuit, in chains.

My Public Pretender whispered to me that he wants to wave the pretrial hearing. I ask him why. The Pretender looked annoyed, very annoyed, at me, and said: “Because if I don’t, a lot of people are going to sit in that chair right over there (he points to the witness stand) and testify against you. I don’t want that to happen.”

He assured me that any deal reached would be more favorable than what the prosecution had planned for me if I were to go to trial, or even go ahead with the pretrial hearing.

I wonder how it got to this point. I’m convinced that my situation could have been handled between humans, rather than lawyers.  But there is a phrase my father used to say, “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

I have never committed a violent act in my life. Ever. Not even during the commission of my alleged crime. Yet, my head was about to be pounded into a 2-by-4 by the blunt instrument of the law.

Sentencing

Now, I waddle in chains before my judge. I give a speech that I prepared containing all of the elements that I had ghost-written for fellow inmates – apologies, admission of guilt, support system of family and friends on the outside, etc.

Then the judge speaks. I try not to shake, to show fear. All the stories you read in the news about defendants “showing no emotion” as verdicts are read are completely meaningless. No reporter can pretend to know what goes through a man’s head at these moments. It is necessary to “show no emotion”– not because you are an emotionless criminal without a conscience – but because keeping a blank expression is all you can do to prevent a torrent of emotions from escaping uncontrolled.

The judge begins by telling me that my case is “unusual,” that here is a guy, 42 years old, never been in trouble with the law before, who then goes and does something “scary.” (Again, he is reading only one side of this story.) The judge continues that, at first, he was inclined to go against the recommendations of everybody involved and sentence me to a few years in prison. My stomach leaps, my legs begin to wobble.

Then, he says, one thing – and one thing only – changed his mind: the letter he received from my wife urging leniency and expressing forgiveness of me. The judge says that if my own wife forgives me for my crime, then he must take that into account as well.

“She’s an amazing woman,” the judge says.

“Yes, Your Honor,” I reply.

He sentences me to six months in the Washtenaw County Jail.

As I leave the courtroom to once again join the other inmates in the holding cell, I tell myself that the outcome could have been worse – much, much worse.

All things considered, “it’s all good.”

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 3: Life on D Block

After the initial “intake” week, all inmates wear green jumpsuits – whether they are accused of felonies or misdemeanors. So, as I enter D Block, the officer on duty hands me a green uniform to swap for my felony orange, along with a blanket, two sheets and a towel.

As I enter my new cell block, I see three people watching television. Sitting on the table, gazing up at Jeopardy is an incredibly large black man. Standing next to him, also watching, are a smaller white kid and a large white man with a shaven head and shaven eyebrows. The officer points me to my new cell, 4D, coincidentally the same odd-shaped lower-tier room on the elbow of the boomerang that was my home on B Block.

Between the time the officer opens the main door to the block, talks to some inmates and I enter my new cell, Alex Trebek asks three questions. They are easy ones, so without even thinking I blurt out the answers. The smaller white kid looks at me and opens his mouth in exaggerated amazement. The large, bald white guy cocks his head to one side and glares at me in a way that did not seem menacing, really. Just sizing me up. The big black guy ignores me and continues to watch TV.

As I get set up in my new cell, grinning and shrugging my shoulders at my new colleagues, I wonder if I have just made a mistake. I had vowed to myself that I would not make the same blunder I had made in Bam Bam by calling attention to myself. I just wanted to anonymously serve my time, whatever length that turned out to be, and not make any kind of impression on anybody – inmate or guard.

One second into D Block and I have already violated that vow. So, rationalizing my behavior, I decide that maybe it’s OK to call some attention to myself, so I don’t appear to be too standoffish to the other inmates. But blurting out “Jeopardy” answers? I have no idea if that is the right kind of attention.

My only conclusion to this inner dialogue is that I am completely incompetent as an inmate. I have no idea what the fuck I am doing and I will more than likely piss the wrong people off without even knowing it.

The Public Pretender

Before I get to know my new blockmates, it is time to meet the Public Defender who will, in theory, argue my side in court. I have already heard these “defenders” referred to by inmates as “Public Pretenders” who do little to defend their clients. The idea, I am told, is to cut deals with prosecutors as quickly as possible and move on to the next victim on the assembly line. They are simply too busy to deal with you in any other way, and strongly discourage the accused from going to trial. Guilt or innocence does not matter, I have heard. It’s all about the art of the deal.

I have reserved judgment until I meet one for myself. I need to remain optimistic. If not, I’d sink back into despair.

I still cannot decide if I had decent representation within the parameters of the “McJustice” doled out via the overworked Public Defender’s office and the backroom horse trading that goes on. If I could have afforded a real lawyer, one with “connections,” would I have done as much jail time? I do not know the answer to that. I tend to think that I would have gone free sooner. But I will never know for sure.

I am taken from my block and brought to a room back near the dreaded holding tanks, meeting with the person with whom I am to entrust my life. And here, in front of me, is Clarence fucking Darrow, himself – all bluster and a bit cartoonish, reveling, it seems to me, in being the center of attention. He is surrounded by assistants, interns, law students – almost all of whom, I am strangely curious to discover, are attractive young women.

It throws me a little. I am telling my story to a Public Pretender who is surrounded by a staff of young females, after I have spent more than a week living in close quarters with nobody but men.

The Pretender tells me that I am not the usual kind of person he represents, since I am apparently well-spoken and educated. But that does not prevent him from launching into street lingo, some of which I ask him to translate for me. He speaks this way out of habit, I am guessing, to try to win the trust of his usual crop of clients.

I have mixed feelings about my Pretender. Do I want what appears to me to be a snake oil salesman representing my interests in these felony cases? Maybe this is exactly the kind of person I need on my side. The lawyer in my misdemeanor cases seemed much too timid for me – in fact, agreeing with the prosecutor in court.

Moot question. The price is right for the Public Pretender. Free is all I can afford, and I guess you get what you pay for.

We talk about the case. I urge him to please, please try to get me out of here as soon as possible. Then I tell him about my nightmarish experience in Bam Bam, adding that I tried to comfort myself by thinking that at least what I endured in “suicide watch” was not quite as bad as the conditions my relatives had endured in Auschwitz.

Completely failing to detect my sarcasm, the Pretender says, “See, now that’s what you need to do. Stay positive.”

He gives me what seems to be a stock pep talk – urging me not to lose hope, not to dwell on the mistakes that got me here, and to think optimistically.

When we are done discussing the case, the Pretender does something strange that I do not “get” until I think about it later in my cell. He leans forward over the table until his shirt is very close to my head and asks me: “Have I lied to you? Have I given everything to you straight?” I answer that, as far as I know, he has not lied to me.

Later, I think of that moment and feel certain that I saw the outlines of a miniature tape recorder in his breast pocket. Of course, I think. The Public Pretender is quite used to unsatisfied clients complaining about their representation after the fact. He just got me on tape saying that I was satisfied with his advice. As savvy as I think I am in many things, I am obviously completely out of my depth in the mills of “justice.”

Cassius

I go back to D Block in not the greatest of spirits after my visit with The Pretender. My body language must have said as much. There is a man on my block, I will call him Cassius, who notices the way I am walking – head down, slumping over slightly. He is a black man, medium height, receding hairline, thin beard, wiry and muscular.

“Oh, now don’t walk that way in front of the CO,” Cassius says. “He sees you walking around like that he’ll think you’re suicidal and put you in Bam Bam.”

I straighten up immediately.

Cassius is a drug dealer who will become one of my best friends, and tutors, throughout my stay in jail. He possesses such a keen mathematical intellect, curiosity about the world and insight into people that, in another life and set of circumstances, he would have succeeded in any respectable endeavor. Or, if honesty is a problem for him in all possible universes, he could have at least become a successful lawyer or politician.

I do not call him African American here because he always insists he is Moorish American. I will later look this up and discover that there really is an entire subset of black Americans who believe they are descended from the Moors. The sect was founded in the early 20th century and was a precursor to the Nation of Islam.

We will have many discussions over the months about religion, philosophy and human nature. When I tell him about the Falasha of Ethiopia, he will express amazement at the existence of black African Jews. Cassius is always writing letters to his sister, asking her to look up information for him on the Internet. A letter back from his sister will confirm that I am telling the truth about the Falasha.

Cassius hates this inability to quickly access information. It is one reason why, later, he becomes what the jail calls a “trustee,” or an inmate who is given preferential treatment in return for work. As a trustee, he gets access to more parts of the jail, travels from block to block and can use his skills as a “dealer” to trade information and other valuable goods and services. Cassius and I will later strike a deal. He will give me some interesting information and hard-to-come-by food and coffee in exchange for what I can do – write. More on that later.

For now, Cassius is outraged that the jail’s legal library is open only to inmates who are representing themselves in court. He asks me whether that is constitutional. Thinking of my experience in Bam Bam, I answer that while I am not certain whether the rule is a violation of our constitutional rights, it really does not matter in here. The jail makes the rules, and people on the “outside” really do not care whether our rights are violated or not.

Snitch

There is a man on my block who is in “protective custody,” which means he cannot be around other prisoners because of possible threats on his life. He gets separate “out” times than the rest of us. He is accused of raping his underage daughter. Perhaps it is for this reason that he is in protective custody. Or it could be that, before he was given protective custody status, he was frequently seen in private conversations with corrections officers. This led to the rumor that he is a “snitch,” reporting information on fellow inmates in exchange for … better treatment? Lighter sentence? I do not know the man’s name, save for the moniker that one inmate has given him, which he screams at him in frequent taunts from his cell: “Ho-ass bitch.”

Bill’s crime scene

The large man who gave me the curious look when I first entered D Block and answered the Jeopardy questions – the one who shaves his eyebrows – I will call Bill. He turns out to be an intelligent, well-read man who apparently has one  flaw: His temper. He will be bumped from block to block because he will amass more than a few enemies everywhere he stays. He is kicked off D Block (later to return) for lifting a man up and hurling him against the large glass window that encloses our block. But to me, he is very personable and we have many conversations about a broad range of topics.

The usual etiquette in jail is not to ask a fellow inmate what crime he is accused of committing unless he shares it with you first. I do not learn of Bill’s alleged crime until I begin noticing holes have been ripped out of the block’s daily copy of The Ann Arbor News (a subscription that will mysteriously end a little later in my narrative). I mention these holes casually to Bill one day and he goes back to his cell to produce the missing clippings from a period of a couple of months.

They were all news articles about him, his bloody crime scene and a victim who is barely surviving an attack. If the victim dies, Bill will be in much worse trouble than he is already in. Bill is in jail awaiting trial, but it seems he will likely go to prison for a very long time.

To pass the time, Bill helps me come up with a glossary of jail slang. Here are excerpts:

• Heron: (accent on the last syllable) Heroin
• Hit it: Have sexual relations
• Bunk and Junk: Pack up your stuff and go home
• Dis Bitch: Jail
• Skittles: Prescription medication
• Catch a case: Refers to where you were arrested. I “caught my case” in Ann Arbor.
• Cookup: A mix of commissary and jail food, usually with Ramen noodles as a base and other ingredients added to taste.

Reminders of home

As it was for me in Bam Bam, when I get to know other people’s stories, it distracts me from my own troubles. But with my court dates coming, and conversations with my wife and kids by phone (very, very expensive collect calls are allowed, so I keep them at a minimum), hiding from my own horrible situation is impossible.

I have two teenage daughters from a previous marriage. I receive a short letter from my ex-wife informing me that my daughters will not communicate with me at all while I am in jail.

I speak on the phone to my oldest son, whose 4th birthday I miss while I am incarcerated. He still thinks I am on a “work trip,” but the boy is very bright and senses holes in “the story.” He quizzes me on why my work trip must continue “for weeks and weeks and weeks,” and why my car remains in the driveway (a friend brought it home from the parking garage off Ann Arbor’s Main Street after my arrest). There is nothing I can do but be vague and assure him that I will be home as soon as humanly possible. I will not lie directly to him because, someday, he will be told the truth about where I was and I do not want him to have memories of his father lying to him.

I hurry back to my cell and break down into uncontrollable sobs – trying to keep them silent for fear that the officer on duty will hear it and send me back to “suicide watch.”

Ghost writer

One day, Cassius sees me scribbling down some notes in preparation for a court date. He asks what I am doing, and I tell him that I preparing some words I want to say to the judge. I let him read what I wrote, and he likes the language used. Cassius has an important sentencing date coming up and wants to say a few things to his judge. It is unknown whether he will go to prison for a few years or be allowed to serve a year in the county jail, with probable early release to a drug rehab center.

So, I strike the first of many deals I will make during my own five months in jail. I ghost write Cassius’ speech in exchange for a couple of Butterfingers candy bars (I have been craving them ever since a heroin addict in Bam Bam spoke endlessly of them), a few scoops of instant coffee and – the Holy Grail of jail junk food – a honeybun. Honeybuns are very much sought-after in jail. In fact, later in my narrative, the theft of a few honeybuns will prompt a huge scandal and lockdown on my block.

Weeks later, I am pleased to see Cassius return from court with a huge grin on his face. He received the best sentence he could have hoped for – no prison time, a year in jail. He says the judge could tell that he did not write the speech, but Cassius informed him, truthfully, that they were all his ideas and that a fellow inmate merely put them into words.

Major ingredients for a successful speech to a judge include:

1. Apologize to the court, to the community and to any victims harmed and admit your mistakes.
2. Talk about what you are doing while in jail to further your education, help the jail community or help control destructive behavior (AA, Alternatives to Domestic Abuse, GED, etc.).
3. Discuss your job possibilities after you return to the community and the support system of family and friends that awaits you.
4. Mention family members, teachers, members of the community who might have written letters to the judge on your behalf.

Do not:

1. Insist you are innocent.
2. Tell a hard-luck story about yourself and your family.
3. Fail to address the court clearly and with respect.

I made sure I put all these ingredients into the speeches I wrote for fellow inmates, most of whom reported very positive results.

When it comes to my own speech before my two judges, I am afraid that I will not be quite so successful. But that is a story for another chapter.

Letter to the editor

One other writing project I gave myself to keep my mind engaged was a letter to the editor of The Ann Arbor News in response to its coverage of the race for Washtenaw County sheriff. Here is an excerpt of a rough draft that I saved.

Your front-page, lead story on July 20, and accompanying editorial, made repeated references to the “chronic, crisis-level jail overcrowding” in Washtenaw County. As an inmate … I wanted to help illustrate the overcrowding problem. …

As of this writing, there are 415 inmates at the 332-bed jail. Five inmates are currently under quarantine for MRSA. The conditions in the gym (used for inmate overflow) are notoriously filthy.

These unhygienic conditions, combined with criminally small portions at mealtimes and inhumane, filthy conditions in the “suicide watch” tank – known ominously among inmates as ‘Bam Bam’ – combine to make the phrase “jail overcrowding” appear to be a darkly comical understatement among the guests here at the facility.

The $22 million, 112-bed expansion will not even begin to address the problems here. Sheriff candidates, and voters, should remember that inmates in our jail are not separate from the community. We are your sons, daughters, husbands, wives and other loved ones. And when we return to the community, we vote.

I will learn later that it was against the policy of The Ann Arbor News to run letters from inmates.

Of course, inmates can receive letters. And a month or so later I will receive a much-welcomed letter from someone I knew before I was in jail.

The letter will be his second attempt to write to me. The first one will be sent back to him as “unacceptable contents” because he will include two blank sheets of paper. Apparently, you are not allowed to send stationery to inmates.

The “logo” that appears with each of these Washtenaw Jail Diary installments is a scan of that returned envelope. The old friend who will write is somebody I know as “Homeless Dave.” He is now editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Cartoons

The tumult of my dream gives way to a strange echo of extremely loud, bizarre voices seeming to surround my cell.

It takes a few moments to register. There is a TV hanging just outside the cell block, with speakers inside. A cartoon is on full blast.

It makes me think immediately of the time the U.S. blasted loud music outside Noriega’s home in Panama to flush him out.

Eventually I will learn to block it out. But, except for nighttime, the full-blast echo of the television will be the soundtrack to my life in the cell blocks.

I have an odd cell, since it’s on the elbow of the boomerang-shaped block. I am lying on a metal cot with a thin blue foam mattress. In the front right corner is a combo sink/water fountain/toilet and a clouded-up piece of metal that might have been a mirror at one time. Just behind my head, next to the bed, is a table with no chair and a fogged-up window. If you squint hard, you can just discern razor wire outside.

The blaring TV reminds me of my phone call with my wife, who told me that Channel [_] had fired me almost immediately as a result of my arrest. They wasted no time. And to add insult to injury, one of my former coworkers now appears on the echoing cell block TV with a news update. This is my own private torture. Because it would blare down at me constantly in jail, I still can no longer stand to watch the local news channel where I used to work.

My first day on B Block is like my first day of kindergarten. I am confused, scared and everybody seems to know everybody else, except me.

Eight inmates are out at a time at three 90-minute intervals per day. That’s 4.5 hours of “out” time and 19.5 hours spent in our cells each day.

I spend most of the first day sleeping, deeply depressed, or just lying in my cell. I have no desire to meet any of my new blockmates.

The next morning, I wake up again to the loud blare of cartoons. I think of that “Far Side” comic depicting a classical musician’s version of hell – one where he’s surrounded by a buck-toothed jug band.

Working out

I finally leave my cell. There is a man who looks like Lenny Kravitz doing push-ups with his feet propped up on one of the stools attached to the table. I surprise myself and “Lenny Kravitz” by propping my feet up on the stool next to him and start doing my own push-ups. Lenny smiles and nods at me while I grunt and groan my way through 20 push-ups.

Lenny tells me I’m doing them wrong, then shows me the correct way to do push-ups, which of course makes them harder to do. I grunt through 20 more. Collapse.

Despite the pain, it feels good to use what little muscle I have after four days of practically no movement and food.

My joining in with Lenny’s exercises seems to have started a trend. Lenny starts doing sit-ups. I join him, along with two or three other inmates. Then we all start doing jumping jacks together, Lenny leading and setting the pace.

They start pointing at us over on the misdemeanor side – they’re wearing their green jumpsuits. Pretty much all of us in orange (felony) jumpsuits are now doing calisthenics in unison. I am not sure how we look to the green jumpsuits.

This sets the pattern for my first week in B Block, with Lenny teaching me how to do more exercises properly. I am still very depressed, but this helps. I know it’s a cliché, deciding to “work out” while you’re in jail. But, seriously, it helps pass the time and makes you feel less blue.

Back in high school and college, a few hundred years ago, I used to run marathons. So the next best thing to running in jail is to pace back and forth. So, that’s what I do.

Back and forth. Back and forth. I pace the upper tier of the cell block six times, touching the wall each time. Then I pace the lower tier six times. Rinse. Repeat.

Like Lenny and his calisthenics, my pacing catches on. And after a few days of this I am like the Pied Piper –  with B Block lower tier following behind me in my pacing.

Shakedowns

I notice Rape Boy from Bam Bam is also on my tier. Apparently tired of telling his “do her doggy” story to whomever is within earshot, he slams the door to his cell and sleeps for three straight days.

The corrections officer on duty wheels in what seems like manna from heaven. Books! A cartload of books! We are allowed to choose five. At this point, it does not matter to me whether they are good or bad books – anything to take my mind far away from this place. I choose mostly science fiction. I want my mind to travel as far as possible from this cell.

The book cart came just in time. For the next three days, we are locked down 24 hours, with no “out” time at all – not even for showers. It is time for an event that occurs every couple of months, I am told – “shakedowns.” That is when guards swarm into cells – one block at a time – and upturn everything in search of contraband or hoarded food.

And when I say everything is upturned, I mean everything.

When it is my turn, a burly, bald-headed guard opens my cell door and orders me to remove my uniform. I am naked. He tells me to turn around and bend over. I try my best not to think about every single TV show or movie I have ever seen that depicts “what happens” to incarcerated men. I bend over. After the guard is satisfied with what he sees, he tells me to stand up straight and turn back around.

“Lift your sack,” he says.

I have to think for a moment. As far as I know, there is no bag anywhere in my cell.

“What?” I ask.

“Your sack,” he says, looking down between my legs.

I am a bit slow, but it finally dawns on me what he is after.

I reach down and lift up my … sack.

To my relief, he finds nothing out of the ordinary (A file? A gun? A cell phone?) hidden under there.

Visit

A female guard rouses me from a dream – one in which I am, again, wandering through the ruins of a city, searching for the TV studio where I worked before my arrest, yelling at one of the reporters from far, far away, about my experience in Bam Bam.

“… visit?” I hear, the scream in my dream still echoing.

“What?”

“Are you ready for your visit?” the officer asks again.

“Sure!” I jump up, excited and nervous to see my wife for the first time since this ordeal began.

The officer leads me out of B Block, down a hallway and to an elevator located right in front of the glass structure at the jail crossroads. We go up one floor and into a white-bricked waiting area with no chairs. Other inmates are pacing back and forth, waiting for their turn in the visiting area.

There is a man waiting with us who walks with a shuffling gait and one arm limp. He has cerebral palsy. I wonder how on earth a man with cerebral palsy ends up in jail. I file this in the back of my mind and forget about it until about 4 1/2 months later, when I will share a cell with this same man and get to know his story.

We all enter at once into the visiting area, pick a standing-room-only cubicle in front of a glass. There is a phone on the right side. I wait for a few minutes. Strangers walk by, gaze at me through the window and move on.

Then my wife appears in front of me. My eyes begin to water as we pick up our respective phones to talk.

My wife looks at me – disheveled, bleary-eyed in my orange jumpsuit – and shakes her head. She tells me that she will have divorce papers served on me while I am in jail.

We talk about the case. We talk about the children, who still believe I am on a long “work trip.”

My stupid mistakes have left a number of victims – including my wife and my two young children. Without my income, my wife could face home foreclosure; my children are without a father.

I leave this first visit in tears. My life, and the lives of those I love most, will never be the same. And I am now powerless to do anything … except wait.

Back in the waiting room, I see other inmates, too, have eyes that glisten.

“Family”

Like most transitions that occur in jail, this next one happens suddenly and unexpectedly. My week in B Block is over and we’re all called out to transfer to new areas. “Hey, you’re breaking up the family,” Lenny tells the officer on duty.

In a way, Lenny is right. It is probably human nature, I suppose, to feel some kind of kinship with those who have shared a stressful situation with you – no matter how brief. I think of my father, a Vietnam War veteran, who still attends reunions with his unit to tell the same stories over and over again.

So, my B Block “family” broken up, I am headed now to D Block, where I will soon to meet the “family” with whom I will spend most of my time in jail.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 2: Transitions

I have not showered in 52 hours while living amid the stench of puke and shit. I remember when I was first taken into custody, a seeming lifetime ago, a kid told me that Washtenaw County Jail is like summer camp.

I wait another few hours in Bam Bam. Then, changes come relatively quickly.

“Break 3!” the guard screams. The door slides open. An officer calls my name. As I leave Holding Cell 3, Frank smiles. I will pass by this cell on my way to court the next few months. Frank will still be there.

I am handed a regular jail uniform (felony orange) and take off the ridiculous Velcro Bam Bam outfit. I am at last allowed to shower. I have moved up in the world. I am placed in a holding cell right next to Bam Bam, awaiting placement to a cell block. Still no phone call.

My name is called again. I am fingerprinted and it is time to say “cheese” to the camera.

As a newsman, I have seen many mugshots – smiling, menacing, drunk, etc. – but I’ve never seen the kind of face I produce for my own mugshot. After 56 hours in Bam Bam, I looked the part: Criminal. Unshaven, uncombed, tired, scared, confused. Charles Manson without the swastika.

Phone Call

Good Cop walks over and lets me out. He motions me to follow. I ask where I am going. “You want your phone call, don’t you?” he replies. Strangely, rather than telling me to use the wall phone like the other inmates, Good Cop takes me to his office and asks, “What number?”

It is bizarre, sitting in what looks like a normal office in the same building where the previous 56 hours I was shoved into a living hell. I don’t know why I got the “office treatment.” Was it because my rights were so obviously denied in “Bam Bam?” Or does he always do this? I’ll think about that later. Right now, I’m trying to think of my home number, my wife’s cell number, anything. I have blanked out. Nothing.

Making “My Phone Call” has been my obsession for 56 hours. Now, here I am and … finally, my home number hits me. I squeak it out.

Good Cop dials my home number on his office phone, and I wait.

No answer.

He hangs up and shrugs. “Of course,” I think. “Just my luck.” I give Good Cop my wife’s cell number. He dials. Waits. Leaves a message that her husband’s in jail.

And that’s it. That’s my phone call.

He’s about to take me back to my cell when the phone rings. I know it’s my wife. Good Cop answers then hands me the phone.

“Hello?”

At the sound of my wife’s voice, I break down in tears. All the intense pressure that had been building since my arrest explodes into sobs. I can barely speak.

And then, I get another shock to my system, a wake-up call that reverberates still.

I ask my wife what my brothers (I have a lot of them) have done to help her and the kids in my absence and if they’ve found me a real lawyer. She tells me that nobody in my family has called or offered to help. Nobody’s looking for a lawyer.

“Nobody wants anything to do with you.”

I suddenly feel very sick. I had endured the 56 hours with at least the comfort of knowing my family was helping on the outside. Not true. My wife had spoken to my court-appointed lawyer (the one who agreed with the prosecutor in court), who told her I’d be in jail for awhile. I cannot afford a “real” lawyer – one who will actually defend me. I will have a court-appointed public defender for my new felony cases.

My young children, my wife tells me, have been told I am on a “work trip.”

I end the conversation with my wife feeling better for talking to her, but worse about my legal situation. I could be in jail a long time.

Good Cop asks me if I’m OK (I must have sounded horrible when I cried to my wife). Afraid of going back to “suicide watch,” I say I’m fine.

Do they realize they’re in jail?

I am placed in an increasingly crowded holding tank, awaiting assignment to a cell block. The thought of having my own cell seems appealing to me at this point.

Holding Tank 2 is noisy with hip-hop chants and ghetto slang. The mood here seems more upbeat than it was in Bam Bam. There’s loud laughing. I think: “Do they realize they’re in jail?”

I am very white. In this holding tank, once I started talking to people, I was addressed by white and black alike as “My Niggah.” The cell echoes with the voice of a white kid who “sounds black,” grabs his crotch a great deal and addresses his colleagues as “dog.” My cellmate’s voice has the cadence of Chris Rock, but tinged with the whiny constipation of Bobcat Goldthwait. He slips easily from speech to rhyme.

There’s a phone in this holding cell, but no receiver. You holler into it and then put your ear up to a speaker to hear the other party. Shouting into it now is Rape Boy, who came with me from Bam Bam. He yells the story I have heard 1,000 times. “Then she texted me to to flip her over and do her doggy …” I am uncertain if I only mentally “roll my eyes.”

“Lion’s Den”

There are many conversations going at once. I tune in and out of some of them. One man says he knows he’ll be OK because of a dream he had. He dreamed he was Daniel in the lion’s den. Only, the “den” was the house of his grandmother, whom he loves. So, he reasons, all will be OK.

His “dream” seems contrived to me. Later, I will rethink my position as my own long, epic, symbolism-heavy jail dreams begin.

The atmosphere is almost festive. For many of the inmates, this cell is a place of reunion with neighborhood friends. The conversations are fast, mixed with rap references and some slang I don’t understand. Everybody calls one another “dog” and “niggah.” Later, I will talk with black friends about the “N” word. My age and older, they don’t approve. Younger people say it depends on context.

The holding cell is so crowded now, there is no room for anybody to lay down. Some inmates tuck their arms into their uniforms and curl up.

I’ve been in a holding cell for about three hours, added to 56 hours in “suicide watch.” Now, I’m waiting for a vacancy in the overcrowded jail.

At last my name is called. After spending 60 hours in three holding cells a few feet away from the entrance, I am now going to see the jail. As I pass by Bam Bam, Frank smiles and gives me a thumbs-up. It’s an ending, of sorts. Phase I of jail ends.

But it’s all really beginning.

Orientation

Inmates are required to walk in single file on the right side of the hallway. We walk away from the holding cells, turn right, then left. We emerge into a kind of crossroads at the jail, a glass structure at the center with officers behind a console. Hallways go in three directions. We are headed to B Block, which is a kind of “intake” area. All inmates start there. Felons to the right, misdemeanors left. I go right.

An officer hands us a towel, two sheets, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a bar of soap. I ask for paper and pen. The officer asks if I have money. Fortunately, I had gone to an ATM before going to court. I had $100 in my wallet – minus the $20 “booking fee,” the first of many cases of robbery committed against me by Washtenaw County.

Earned Release Record of Hours – Washtenaw County Jail (image links to higher resolution file)

So, I get a few sheets of lined paper, some pens and envelopes. We are all told to sit down and, strangely, a TV is wheeled in front of us. Then it gets even more bizarre. New inmates are forced to watch a poor-production-quality, homemade orientation video from a circa 1980s VCR.

I joke to myself that while Bam Bam was the worst experience I had ever been through in my life, watching this video comes in a close second. Wooden-looking officers on an overused, jumpy videotape recite jail rules, much of which is unintelligible because of the echo off concrete walls.

A poster on the wall reads: “Help yourself get out of jail early.” It outlines “earned release” – one of the jail’s biggest lies. Months later, I’ll do extra work around the jail in illusory hope that my earned release card will convince my judges to let me out early.

I comment to the inmate next to me (white rap guy from holding tank) about the amateurish production quality of the video. “What?” he says.

B Block

We are in a common room. In back of us is an office for the CO on duty. To our left and right are two halves of the cell block. Each cell block side is located behind separate doors surrounded by tall windows so the corrections officer in charge can see what’s happening in each side.

There is a rectangular, picnic-style table with attached stools in a common area on each side of the block, and two tiers of cells.

It is somewhat of a misnomer to say you are “behind bars” at the Washtenaw County Jail. You’re really behind steel doors. No bars.

The two tiers on each side of the block have eight cells each. That’s 16 inmates on each side. Each cell has a steel door and long, thin window.

I am taken to the right side – the orange-uniformed felony side – and told to go to cell 4B. This is my new home for this first “intake” week. The officer has trouble with a sticky latch. So, he literally slams my door shut. Bam! I’m locked inside my own cell for the first time.

I do not bother looking around my new accommodations. I curl up on the hard cot and begin the first of my many epic jail dreams.

First Dream

I am walking on a city street. Probably Manhattan. I am on a cell phone, but the connection is so bad that I only hear faint whispers. I’m trying to talk to my boss at the TV station where I worked before I was jailed. I can’t get through. Or, rather, I am getting through, but my boss’s voice is so far-away sounding, I cannot hear above the clatter of the city.

I shout. I try to shout the reason why I did not show up for work. Something happened to me that [reporter name] would be interested in.

My boss cannot hear me. All I hear are unintelligible whispers. I shout more and more about my arrest, my rights being denied in Bam Bam. The more I shout, the more the voice on the other end fades, until there is just silence. Extremely frustrated, I decide to run to work.

I do not ordinarily dream in the form of bad disaster-movie epics, nor are they normally so heavy handed in metaphor. But this is no ordinary time. Like the “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” dream I overheard in Holding 2, maybe the subconscious knows when it’s crisis time and time to be obvious. Whatever the reason, here’s what happens next:

I run down this strange city street. The city is definitely NYC, even though I work in Detroit. My dream mind has no trouble with this. But I do have trouble staying on my feet. The sidewalk starts shaking with every step. It’s a variation on the “can’t-run-in-my-dreams” thing. But I can run. The concrete won’t let me. There is a bridge up ahead that begins to cross over an ocean, then doubles back to where the city meets the shore. It splits into two tiers.

My office, in my mind, is over the bridge. I run on the upper tier, glance at the ocean and see a bridge-wrecking, city-swallowing tsunami.

I will not go into all the twists and turns of my dream, which would probably make a shrink see dollar-signs for decades. The elements: extreme frustration, need to tell/warn somebody, impending disaster.

My need to tell what happened to me in jail “suicide watch” becomes an obsession in reality and in dream. Yet, in both, nobody really cares.

It unsettles me greatly, this knowledge that because I’m accused of a crime, most would believe I deserve all bad things that happen in jail.

In the end, the tsunami strikes, destroying the bridge, but I scramble with a couple other survivors to the top of a tall, strong building. Atop this building, I see ruins below. In future dreams, I will wander among those ruins.

I wake up. I am in my cell.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the next installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Suicide watch

There’s some silence. Then Charlie tells me that now I will probably stay in Bam Bam longer than I should. He turns out to be correct.

The detoxing teen heroin user asks, “Do you really work for Channel [_]?” I say I do, then think that I will likely lose my job now. I am right.

Eventually, Charlie goes back to his block. Heroin teen goes home. Each time the officers come, I cite the number of hours I’ve been without my phone call. I have not eaten any of the meals offered. It is the beginning of the Washtenaw County Jail radical-weight-loss plan for me.

I am alone in Holding 4, half-naked in my Velcro Bam Bam suit. It is approaching evening. I think of my wife and children, I think of the humiliation when my coworkers find out. For the first time today, I break down into sobs.

I spend the night in Holding Cell 4 and manage to fall restlessly asleep. Then, the “suicide watch” feature of the accommodations kicks in.

When I read, or write, about “suicide watch” in the news, I picture a team of nurses and psychiatrists asking the prisoner how he “feels.” Now I learn what really occurs.

At night, a guard runs by the cell every two hours and bangs on the window. If you startle, you’re alive. If you do not move, then the officer’s extensive psychiatric training kicks in. The guard will enter the cell and poke you with his finger. If you move, you’re alive. Next patient, please. That is suicide watch.

Holding Cell 3

It is again morning. I have been in jail a day now and it has already changed me permanently. It is too much to hope that I can simply wait out my time in Bam Bam with a holding cell all to myself. I am transferred to Holding 3. “Break 3!” the guard screams to desk officers who release the sliding doors.

I enter into a crowded holding cell, and the biggest nightmare of my life.

First thing that hits me is the smell, then the solemn faces that look up disinterestedly. My first day was nothing, a picnic. Here is the real Bam Bam.

This is the bottom half of the author's sketch of Holding 3's layout. From the center, clockwise: Me | "Old School" 10-year old warrant | Drunk | Toilet | and that's booshit

There are five inmates in Holding 3. I am the sixth. Six can lie down semi-comfortably on the ledges and the floor. I throw down my foam mat.

To my left is a man lying on two foam mats – relative comfort. Yet he grimaces. He had fallen down courthouse steps while in leg irons and handcuffs. He takes one glance and, again, there must be something about me that gives it away: “You’ve never been in jail before,” he says.

To my right is an elderly black man everyone just calls “Old School,” which is a kind of label of respect for all older black men in jail. Older white men, in general, do not merit an “Old School” designation. Usually, they are called “Pops.”

Old School, in Bam Bam due to a heart condition, doesn’t know why he’s in jail. He shows me a court paper. Something about a 1992 case. As best as I can tell, Old School was pulled over for DWB (driving while black) and his name came up in a ’92 warrant for a traffic offense. So they haul a confused, old man with a heart condition into a filthy, crowded holding tank in an overcrowded jail. Nice, Washtenaw County.

For unexplained reasons, Old School looks to me as a reliable source of information on what is going to happen to him. I try as best I can. It is the beginning of a trend. Fellow inmates can tell I am new in jail, but also sense in me some kind of unearned intellectual authority. I will be called upon to settle arguments about wide-ranging topics during the course of my five months in the Washtenaw County Jail. My advice to Old School is the start of a kind of career in jail. Later, I branch out into ghost writing speeches for inmates to give before their judges. In the end, I will be proud of how I behaved toward others (with some very dramatic exceptions) in an extremely stressful environment.

But, for now, there is only anger, distress as my rights are denied and as I take in what is happening in this increasingly crowded cell. In the right corner of the cell sits a man I’ll call “Frank,” a muscular black man in his 30s with a weary-looking face. He has been in Bam Bam for three months. Frank is in suicide watch by choice. It’s a last-ditch defense tactic. Charged with armed robbery, Frank is going for an insanity defense. Anyone who willingly subjects himself to Bam Bam must be crazy, his reasoning goes. So he refuses to see a shrink, refuses to go to a block.

In every part of the jail I live in the next five months, there is always one experienced person who takes me under his wing. Frank does this for me in Bam Bam. Frank had heard my confrontation with the guard in Holding 4. He thinks I can tell his story to Channel [_]. I am sorry, Frank. My old employers now want nothing to do with a convicted criminal.

During my first month in jail, I would have vivid, epic dreams in which I try to make it back to work to tell the reporters what I’ve seen. Later, I would learn that even in a “news” organization, nobody is interested in the lives of convicted criminals. Jail. End of story. But, again, I get ahead of myself. I am still in my second day at the jail and I am living in an increasingly crowded, filthy holding tank.

And in walks the accused rapist.

Flush on 3

I will see him on and off for the next three months – as his case goes back and forth from 2nd-degree to 3rd-degree “criminal sexual conduct.” I will know more about his case than I care to, since he talks endlessly about it – going through the same story over and over again. I have noticed already that there is very little real conversation in jail. Instead, everybody seems to be carrying on parallel monologues. One of the best compliments I receive from an inmate will be spoken in a couple of months: “I like you, [______]. You listen, then you talk.”

But the alleged rapist is a man – a child, really, at 19 – who does little listening and a lot of talking. He has an almost intelligent look about him, with a goatee and glasses. But the illusion is shattered when he opens his mouth. He practices his “story” on us. The woman who accused him of rape is his first “baby mama.” His second “baby mama” cried in court, which made him cry. So, he was sent to suicide watch.

Rape Boy says that he has text messages from the alleged victim telling him to do her doggy style. He says this over and over again. He also says there must be apartment surveillance video showing that she had buzzed him in many times. Later, I will share a courthouse holding cell with him and hear, with satisfaction, his lawyer say that none of these things are a defense. But, for now, I just listen to this 19-year-old kid talk endlessly about his “baby mamas” and what he’ll do to each of them when he gets out.

By now the stench is approaching unbearable. Frank gets up and pounds on the cell window. Frank pounds a few times before he has a guard’s attention. Then makes a twisty motion with his fingers. “Flush on 3!” Frank yells. “Can you give us a flush on 3?”

We do not operate our own toilets. It is the loudest flush I have ever heard, filling the cell with sound, halting all conversation for about 30 seconds.

Bricks and Butterfingers

A nurse comes with medication. I tell her how many hours I have been in jail without my phone call. She does not look very interested. The nurse asks me how I am. I say I’m fine, except I’m in jail. She says that she’s in jail, too. “Except I get to go home.” Such compassion.

I am seen by a community mental health worker. He questions me and determines I am not suicidal, says he will recommend I be taken out of “checks.” I am not comforted by this. I know that although the booking officers are about 15 feet away, my paperwork will likely get “lost” as a result of my earlier confrontation with the officer.

More people are packed into the cell. The air is thick with unpleasant odors and the walls seem to be closer. I stare at the white bricks, feeling helpless and hopeless. No contact with my family, no knowledge of when I will be allowed contact. I gaze at the bricks and wonder how it would feel if I bashed my head against them.

I came to suicide watch with no thoughts of suicide. About 40 hours of denial of rights, of no hope, of no information, and all options are open.

To distract myself and to keep my mind from spinning into a dangerous loop, I strike up a conversation with the heroin addict in the corner I’ll call “Jack.” Jack’s stringy hair hides his eyes, forcing him to jerk his head back in nervous nods now and then. Jack insists he had hidden a heroin syringe in his shoe, somehow transferred it to his jail sandal, only for it to fall out on the walk to Bam Bam. It was to have been Jack’s last fix before detox in jail. He’s quitting for good, he says, having spent too much of his wife’s money on his habit.

Jack’s wife has a honorable, professional job. And while she works all day, Jack stays in the basement – shooting up. Great arrangement. The happy couple – heroin addict and respected professional  – dipped into retirement to pay off court costs. He was going to leave jail with a clean slate. The nurse had given Jack something. Not sure if it was methadone. It relieved his withdrawal symptoms. Now, though, he craves Butterfingers.

I ask Jack what it felt like the first time he tried heroin. He grins deeply at the memory and says it was 10 times better than sex. But now, for Jack, nirvana can be achieved only through Butterfingers bars via a magical place – on a real cell block – where inmates can have rights to something he calls “commissary.”

Jack talks so much about Butterfingers that his obsession becomes my obsession. I have eaten little in 40 hours. Butterfingers sound nice. My first taste of jail has been Bam Bam, the worst place to be outside solitary. I wonder what’s next. I think about this “commissary” and Butterfingers.

Sights, scents and sounds

The drunk enters the tank, swearing up a storm. He’s tall, thin and talks to nobody in particular as he lies down near the toilet in back. “I blew a motherfucking .08. So fucking what? To me that’s just a fucking hangover. So they put me in fucking Bam Bam? Fuck!” Then he pukes. The drunk’s puke is not cleaned during the rest of my stay in Bam Bam – still roughly 12 hours to go in that tank. The smell lingers.

It has been 42 hours since I “disappeared.” No contact allowed with family. I’m laying half-naked in a crowded cell with the stench of puke.

But I’m not the only one feeling uncomfortable. On the floor ahead of me is a guy with long, gray hair moaning, “I need my crack pipe!”

The drunk is sleeping it off in his own puke, snoring and slaying some demons in his sleep, and the odor of shit cuts through. Charlie sees me wrinkle my nose and nods knowingly. He says there was a Mexican guy in here a few days ago who didn’t make it to the toilet. The cell was never properly washed and you can still pick up the odor of shit when the vents start pumping out air. Like now.

I try to sleep with the overwhelming smell of human waste. Then I learn the other reason they call this area of the jail Bam Bam.

Bam! Bam! The sound comes from Holding 2, which is usually reserved as a cell for inmates waiting for transport to and from court. Tonight, Holding 2 must be either a Bam Bam spillover, or it’s where drunks come to sober up without actually being booked into the jail.

Bam! Bam! The pounding gets louder. His is the only voice you hear. “I want a fucking cup! Where’s my fucking cuuuuuuup!” Bam! Bam! “This is like fucking Guantanamo, man. Guantanamo. Where’s my fuuuuucking cuuuuup!” Bam! Bam! Bam!

Eventually, we learn to ignore him. Cup Man goes on all night. Not an exaggeration. All … Night.

He does, however, get me thinking about the Guantanamo comparison. But Guantanamo is not in my frame of reference for the situation I am in. I come from a family of Holocaust victims and survivors. Auschwitz. I do not go screaming “Auschwitz” and “Holocaust” everywhere. I am not the kind who sees Nazis in the woodwork. I know I am not in Auschwitz. But, the way I feel, the filth I am living in, huddled in a crowded cell, my right to contact my family denied. I think of those pictures of bewildered skeletons after liberation. I understand that is not where I am. Yet, it is how I feel.

I try to use the comparison to my advantage. I think of what my great-uncle endured in Auschwitz and decide this is nothing in comparison. It’s a selling point, I joke to my increasingly insane-sounding mind. “Washtenaw County Jail Suicide Watch: At Least It’s Not Auschwitz.”

Bam! Bam! “Where’s my cuuup!” Cup man shouts. Rape Boy in the corner is boring another victim with his story: “Yeah, Dog, she texted me to turn her over and do her doggy.”

The repetition makes me think, hope, that this is all a bad dream.

Good Cop

“I have been here 48 hours now and I still have not been allowed my phone call.” The officer looks bored, looks through me.

It had been a horrible night, between yells of Cup Man, the repetition of Rape Boy and the every-two-hours window banging of suicide watch. I approach Day 3 resolved to get out of Bam Bam and get my phone call. I see others come and go. I see others making calls. So it’s possible. I try to think logically, although my base-coat of panic is never far from the surface. Who knows how to get things done? I turn to Frank.

Frank has been here so long that he knows which officer will help you out and which to avoid. He points to a tall, older man in civilian clothes. “He’ll get you your phone call and get you out of here,” Frank says. And he’s right. It will take about 8 more hours, but he’s right. The man Frank points to is a distinguished-looking sergeant.

Every now and then, the sergeant walks from holding cell to holding cell – not opening the doors, but placing his ear nearby and listening. It looks like he is used to cleaning up the messes his officers have made. I am one of those messes. I guess you’d call him the “Good Cop.”

Good Cop listens intently to inmates through glass windows, jots down names and notes, moves on. I wave for his attention … too late. Cart pushers come in with trays. Good Cop disappears back behind the officers’ glass. Another meal for me to reject is pushed in. I still have eaten very little since my arrival. I pick at my food a little, then give most of it to Frank, who devours it appreciatively. It sickens me a little to watch that garbage being eaten so quickly. But I am beginning to understand how food is used as currency in jail. Frank gave advice on how I can get my phone call. So he gets my food tray. I’ve not yet experienced the deep, deep hunger I will feel later.

“. . . and that’s boooshit,” says Rape Boy. That’s pretty much how he ends every story he tells, since most are about how he’s been wronged. Another story about his “baby mamas,” then he turns to me and says something I never saw coming.

Rape Boy says the name of an anchorwoman at the TV station where I work and asks if he could meet her.

I say I likely would not see her again.

Then he asks if I am going to “put Washed-Away County Jail on TV” or tell “the news” what goes on in Bam Bam. I say I will try.

“They should do something on Old School,” Rape Boy says, pointing at the old man. I agree that they should, but they probably won’t.

Frank nods. “We’re in jail,” Frank says. “Out of sight, out of mind. Nobody wants to see us on TV after we’re in jail.” I agree that he is right. Then Frank adds: “But you’ll go tell [name of anchorwoman] about Old School. She’ll put him on TV.” I smile in a noncommittal way. “I don’t think I’ll be telling any anchorwomen about anything when I get out,” I say. “I don’t think I’ll have a job anymore.”

Then Good Cop comes out near the cells again. I bolt upright, run to the window and bang for his attention. Bam! Bam! “Excuse me, sir?”

And here I am, saying words that, about 50 hours earlier, I could never have imagined would come from my mouth.

“Excuse me, sir? I have been in Bam Bam 50 hours, was cleared after 24 hours as not suicidal and I have not been allowed my phone call.”

“Wait wait, one thing at a time,” Good Cop says patronizingly, taking out a notepad. “Who cleared you?” I freeze. No idea what his name was. If he had told me his name, it didn’t stick. So I think of his identifying features. “An Asiany looking guy who smiles too much,” I say.

“OK. If he cleared you, then there’s no problem,” Good Cop says. I tell him that the paperwork was somehow lost before it reached the desk. He stops writing and glares at me. I am guessing he knows that if the paperwork was “detoured,” then I must have caused some trouble.

Good Cop is the first apparently sane person I have spoken to since the ordeal began, so I start speaking faster to tell him my whole tale. “Whoa, slow down,” he says. “You claim you were cleared, but there’s no paperwork showing it. You’re in checks, so no phone call.” My heart sinks. Back where I started. It’d be funny if I did not have a role in this joke.

“To my family, I’ve just disappeared,” I say.

Good Cop is well aware of the Catch-22 involved in cases like mine. In the end, there are no rules. There is simply the judgment of an officer.

For a brief moment I see a light go on in Good Cop’s eyes. He is assessing me. I think I pass some kind of test. “I’ll look into it,” he says. He is the first cop I encounter in jail who is not lying when he says that. There will be only one other.

The door to Holding 2 slams shut and for the first time I think about what exactly I’m going to say to my wife once I get my call. It is going to be a bad conversation. My thoughts turn full-time back to the real world now. I do not expect to be in jail more than another day or so. Need to salvage my life. I think of what a mess I’ve made of things and I start to feel physically ill.

I will discover later that it is best to turn off the portion of your brain that makes you think too much about life outside of jail.

“You’re getting out of Bam Bam soon and going home,” Frank says. He turns out to be half right.

Frank tells me not to forget about them when I get out and to tell everybody about what goes on in Bam Bam. I do not forget. Later, my public defender will advise me not to write about this experience while I am on probation because of possible reprisals against me. I am now ignoring that advice. It is one reason I am writing anonymously.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.

Editor’s Note: After the break begins the first installment of the Washtenaw Jail Diary, written by a former inmate in Washtenaw County’s jail facility on Hogback Road. The piece originated as a Twitter feed in early 2009, which the author subsequently abandoned and deleted. See previous Chronicle coverage “Twittering Time at the Washtenaw County Jail.“

In now working with the author to publish the Washtenaw Jail Diary, The Ann Arbor Chronicle acknowledges that this is only one side of a multi-faceted tale.

We also would like to acknowledge that the author’s incarceration predates the administration of the current sheriff, Jerry Clayton.

This narrative, which we expect will run over a series of several installments, provides an insight into a tax-funded facility that most readers of The Chronicle will not experience first-hand in the same way as the author.

The language and topics introduced below reflect the environment of a jail. We have not sanitized it for Chronicle readers. It is not gratuitously graphic, but it is graphic just the same. It contains language and descriptions that some readers will find offensive.

Chapter 1: Bam Bam

-

Prologue

It is a spring day in 2008. Yesterday, I told my boss I’d be a little late for work today, that I have to take care of some minor legal trouble in Ann Arbor, but I should be in sometime in the afternoon. So, this morning I kiss my wife goodbye. She says something sarcastic and cutting about the misdemeanor case I’m going to take care of. I expect to get two years probation, no jail time and that Washtenaw County will shake me down for a few thousands dollars in court costs – money that I, of course, do not have.

I drop my kids, ages 3 and 2, at their preschool. As I take them to their classrooms, I get a “feeling,” a real bad feeling that makes me almost physically ill. I give them each extra-tight, unusually long hugs before I tell them goodbye and to have a fun day.

My car’s a little shaky and in bad need of repair, but I manage to make it from suburban Detroit to Ann Arbor. Along the way, David Bowie’s “Sorrow” plays on my tape deck. I sing along. “With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue; The only thing I ever got from you was sorrow. Sorrow.”

I have a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. Repeating song lyrics in my head is sort of my equivalent of rocking back and forth to comfort myself. There is a decent cadence to the Bowie song.

I am so nervous, I can hardly move. I park in the garage across Main Street and wobble across the crosswalk to the gates of hell – Washtenaw County’s 15th District Court.

“You never do what you know you oughta; Something tells me you’re a Devil’s daughter. Sorrow. Sorrow.”

I enter the building, wondering – just barely above conscious thought – how long it will be before I see the light of day again. I have a bad feeling.

Courtroom

“Well, you’re going to jail,” my court-appointed lawyer tells me. My eyes briefly go dark and the courtroom spins.

I grasp the lawyer’s shoulder to steady myself and plead, as if a touch will convince.

“No,” I say. “I can’t go to jail. My kids need me. What can I do?”

“Beg,” he says. “Just beg. That’s your only hope.”

And the mind does try to find hope in hopeless situations. I really believe him. So, I think of, rehearse in my mind, ways I can beg the judge. But, in the end, I simply mutter something about my financial responsibilities to my family. No reaction from the judge.

“Your honor, he did not violate the letter of your instructions, but he did in spirit,” my lawyer says.

It is when this lawyer refuses to defend me that it truly sinks in. For the first time in my life, I am going to jail. JAIL!

In the corner of my eye, I see an officer position himself between me and the courtroom door, reaching for handcuffs. There is a tiny moment when I calculate unrealistic odds: If I “run for it” now, could I zigzag my way around the cop?

Then I think of my kids, my wife, and the room spins again, my eyes start to go dark.

My lawyer steadies me and asks if he needs me to contact anybody. Officer Friendly with the handcuffs says I’ll be able to make a call from jail. This promise of a phone call to my wife will become my obsession for the next 56 hours.

The judge says she is “worried about me” based upon some statements made by my alleged victims. Therefore, she is sending me to “suicide watch.” Soon, I will learn what Washtenaw County Jail’s “suicide watch” is. Inmates call it Bam Bam. And it is a human rights violation.

But, for now, I am comforted that I will be able to call my family from jail, hopefully get a real lawyer, get it all straightened out. I hold out my wrists, I am handcuffed and taken to a room at the rear of the courtroom. Shaking, I enter a strange new world.

“I tried to find her, ’cause I can’t resist her; I never knew just how much I missed her; Sorrow. Sorrow.”

Holding tank

After being relieved of my jacket, shoelaces and belt, I am locked in a holding tank for about 45 minutes with two other men. One is an older black man with a weathered face. The other looks like a teenager.

I ask what it’s like in the Washtenaw Jail. The older man grins. “You ain’t never been to jail before.” He is the first of many to take one look at me and guess. The teen-looking guy rolls his eyes: “Pfft. Washtenaw’s like summer camp.”

To pass time, we twirl the chains on our handcuffs. The smell in the holding pen, with three men and one toilet, is noticeable. Over time, I will build a kind of immunity to odors. When it is time to leave the holding pen, the Ann Arbor officer shackles our legs, chains the three of us together and we waddle out. For some reason, I never really mind handcuffs. It is the ankle-pinching leg irons and the forced waddling that will always get to me.

During the drive in the back of a police van from downtown Ann Arbor to the jail on Hogback Road, I comfort myself that I am OK and this will be over soon. I am wrong on both counts.

The Velcro Bam Bam suit

The sliding doors to the jail open and the first thing I see are four holding pens containing what looks to me to be masses of men dressed in orange, green and blue. In the last two pens on the right are half-naked men wearing robes that Velcro together on their shoulders. Bam Bam. It will be my home for the next 56 hours.

An officer throws me a Velcro Bam Bam suit and slippers. I say so long to street clothes for five months. The suit is also derisively called a “dress” by some inmates. It looks like a cross between a hospital gown and one of those heavy X-ray vests. It opens with Velcro in the front, and no underwear is allowed. I guess you could strangle yourself or others with underwear.

This Velcro suit is one reason they call this area Bam Bam. You look like a Flintstones caveman. Soon, I will find out the other reason.

A nurse approaches me. “Do you have thoughts of killing yourself?” she asks. I answer, “No.” She checks “Yes” on her little sheet of paper. I guess if the judge says I am suicidal, then I am.

“Can I make a phone call now?” I ask. “After you’re booked in,” the officer says. “When will I be booked in?” I ask. “Not my decision,” he says. This will become a pattern in the next few days: I make requests based on what I think my “rights” are, and officers ignore me.

The officer’s eyes give me a nanosecond of pity, seeing that I am obviously new at this. “Break 4!” he shouts. The door to Holding 4 opens.

“Here are a couple of nice gentlemen you can share a room with,” the officer says, instructing me to throw a rubber mat on the cell’s floor. Two weary faces look up at me. Each had already staked their claims on high-rent ledges in the holding pen. My new home is on the floor. My cellmates are both wearing Bam Bam suits. One of them is a muscular, older black man, the other a young white kid detoxing from heroin.

The kid does not say much. The older man never stops talking. Ever. He’s in Bam Bam as a punishment for, of course, talking too much on his block.

Now, he poses like he’s throwing a discus. “These dresses make us look like Julius Fucking Caesar.”

I laugh for the first time in jail.

The man doing the “Julius Fucking Caesar” impression – I’ll call him “Charlie.” He talks about how his son is in jail here, too. (Months later, I will have a conversation with a corrections officer who can name all the multiple-generation inmate families at the jail.) Charlie’s in Bam Bam because he wouldn’t shut up in the bunk area of the gym. The gym is where they cram the spillover in the overcrowded jail.

Charlie talks incessantly – about injustices past and present, about the son he barely knows and of his girlfriend, who claimed he beat her. I wince slightly. I have not yet gotten used to carrying on seemingly normal conversations with men who might have done very bad things.

Charlie’s rapid-fire talk is punctuated by his window-banging. When can he go back to his block? Who is the “property officer”? Whatever that is. His voice, the banging, set me on edge again. I make a mental note never to become a window-banger.

Listening to Charlie’s stories had taken me away from my own troubles, but hearing his demands bring me back. What about my phone call? Sadness, shame of arrest is giving way to outrage, anger over rights not granted. To my wife and coworkers, I imagine, I simply vanished. My phone call! I’m supposed to get a motherfucking phone call! I begin to “think” in the language of my surroundings.

I bang on the window.

The phone call, the phone call, the phone call

“I have been here for three hours and haven’t been allowed my phone call.” For the next 53 hours, I will preface all my requests with this hour count, much to the puzzlement of my captors.

“You’re in checks. No calls until mental health clears you,” the officer says. “Checks” is another word for “suicide watch” – I guess because they supposedly “check” on you.

“But I have a right to a call,” I respond.

The officer smiles slightly, then speaks slowly as if addressing a child. “You … are … in … checks. No … calls.” Then he walks away.

For the first time in my adult life, I feel completely helpless. And to a man who’s never been helpless or caged, this feeling turns to rage. I have not yet learned that in jail, rage and impatience are useless emotions. They never get you anything and almost always make things worse.

Pressures of this horrible day are building in my head. I’ve become so outraged I literally cannot see straight. I’m pacing around the cell. No more Bowie in my head. It is the phone call, the phone call, the phone call. That is my obsession – although, by now, my wife has probably guessed that something went wrong in court.

I went to court this morning thinking I would take care of two misdemeanors, then drive to work. It was bumped to four felonies. I was arrested. Arrested, but not yet “booked in” since I am in this no-man’s land known as “suicide watch,” “checks,” “Bam Bam,” whatever. I don’t exist.

I think of myself as a “disappeared” Central American prisoner whose family, friends never hear from again. Well, this is what my mind turns to in my panicked state. I explain this analogy to blank-faced officers who only see a likely suicidal lunatic blabbering on about disappearing in Central America.

Again it was explained. No phone call because you’re in “checks,” no phone call until after you’re “booked in.” My agitation increases. The smug officers, the closed-in space that seems more suffocating by the hour, the banging, the panic bring me to a point beyond reason.

It is in this unreasonable state of mind that I make one of the worst mistakes I will make in my entire five months at the jail.

“How things work”

Before I was arrested, I worked on the Web site for a local Detroit TV station.

I am delirious with anger, frustration, panic, unable to think clearly. I blurt out the most asinine thing possible.

“I work for Channel [_] and they will find out how my rights are being violated!”

The background cacophony of Bam Bam goes silent for what is probably only 1 second, but seems to last 15, while all register what I said.

I’ll never know for sure, but I am convinced that my stupid little rant is the reason I spend 56 hours (not the customary 24) in Bam Bam.

After the silence, in my eyes there is something akin to a quick zoom of a camera onto a tall, young corrections officer not more than 25 years old. He turns around to face me after he hears my words.

Zzooom!

He hollers: “Break 4!” The doors to my cell, Holding 4, open.

“What?” he asks.

My “colleagues” suddenly find other things to do in the back of the cell. The officer hovers over me, stares me down. “What did you say?”

A chubby, crew-cut cop, the “yuk-it-up” type, decides to get involved. “He said he’s with Channel [_] and he wants his phone call,” he smirks.

“Let me explain to you how things work here because you look like you’re new at this,” says the tall officer hovering over me. The cop’s face contorts into an expression that is just the right, practiced blend of anger and sarcasm.

Then I make my second dumb mistake.

I interrupt the officer who is about to tell me “how things work.” I open my mouth to squeak a few words about “my right to a phone call.”

This gives the officer a chance to use what is obviously one of his favorite phrases. “If you would keep your jaws from flapping, I would tell you how things work,” the officer says.

I’m a little slow. But I now do understand. It is one thing to understand, on an academic level, what it must be like to have no rights. It is another thing to truly experience it. Rules that applied to my previous 40-plus years are no longer applicable. I am now an infant again, dependent on the whims of strange, large beings. I make a show out of closing my jaws immediately. No more “flapping.”

The officer continues his speech, a little louder. I am not listening. The realization that I have no rights at all is now making me more upset.

Like a genius, I interrupt again. And that does it for the officer. This time, the look on his face is true anger, not the practiced sarcasm of cops. Now, he is going to say what is really going to happen.

“We’ll see how long it takes for you to get out of Bam Bam,” he says. “We’ll see if you ever get to make your call.” He turns around. Done.

Three seconds of silence provide the perfect opportunity for the crew-cut “yuk-it-up” cop to turn to the booking officers and point at me.

“This guy’s with Channel [_] and he wants to make a phone call right now!” That was the punch line. Waves of laughter pour from the officers. The laughter is muted with the slam of the sliding door to Holding Cell 4.

Editor’s note: All installments of the “Washtenaw Jail Diary” that have been published to date can be found here.