17 Days

St. Cloud prison was the worst, most foul place I have ever been in my lifetime. I had the benefit of being a swamper in "B House" for a little over three months of my five month stay. Swamper is the term we used for the job of house cleaning crew. It had a number of benefits, including being out of our cells for over half of the day compared to a few scattered periods of no more than 50 minutes in which 180 guys scrambled to use the showers, phones, microwaves, and play games or use the weight bench. What a mess. There were times when I stood in the shower line for half an hour or more and our flag period was cut short for unknown, never explained reasons, and I would head back to my cage to sit in the 100° humid air that flowed in no direction. That was another benefit of being a swamper, we could shower at our leisure. Alone and for as long as I wanted, I could stand under the rope of water that shot out of the spigot. The temperature varied but it was always warm. It was a small taste of the free world, one I would think of often in boot camp.

For my first 17 days in St. Cloud, it was a whole different story. "E House" is the starting point for every offender in on a new charge. It is where we go through orientation and classification, and are bombarded with useless information. We get to watch the P.R.E.A. video: A 1980's take on prison rape, and how to avoid it by not folding peoples laundry, giving them candy bars, and wearing fabulous mustaches. We are given a brief medical and dental exam and shown the proper way to floss but given no floss to use.

Offenders are not allowed to have TV's or go to the library while in E House. There is a book shelf with worn and tattered half-books, quite literally torn in half. Most were in Spanish, something I didn't find out until I brought my first selection back to my cold steel apartment. I just grabbed one and moved on. For me it was only 17 days of boredom. My first cellie taught me to make dice and dominoes from toilet paper. We would soak it, form it, and then wait a few days for them to dry, and then we would make the dots and they were ready for use. We played games for hours, until out asses were numb from sitting on the small steel chairs. But mostly we would just lay down on our bunks and think. My cellie had been in for over 50 days when he was finally called to move.

It was prison like you see in movies. Stacks of cells with steel bar sliding doors, people yelling back and forth from the galleys, and once in a while an officer would pass by, unable or unwilling to answer questions or be helpful in any way. The toilets were all one piece, stainless steel, loud, and disgusting. Often my cellie would have no choice but to be looking in my direction while shitting, something I never got accustomed to.

It was 17 days I will never forget. There were many periods during my incarceration that were similar in their impact, but that was the first. It was the first place I heard the term, " On my momma, Joe" a phrase that guarantees an honest statement out of black men from Chicago. I once smelled hot dogs wafting over from the kitchen and I stated just that, to which one man said, "on my momma it do." By that reasoning I could deduct that if it wasn't in fact hot dogs for dinner, I could hold his mother accountable for my lie, right? I would hear this phrase over and over everywhere I went during my stay in prisons, and it never got old.

Yep, its just another story of my time in prison. I keep writing about it so I never forget. I do not ever want to go back there. I need to keep doing good things out here, not just while I'm on ISR, but for the rest of my life if I want to stay out here. And that's on my momma, Joe.