Smoking bans in prison: what a riot! PBABES@ONION 9-11SATDY

Written on July 1, 2015   By admin   in gigs

No words were wasted. Curt instruction replaced communication, as I was divested of possessions, then clothes, then dignity. “Turn and face the wall. Bend over. Spread your cheeks.” Nope, no hidden cache of self-respect between them. While Fitzroy hoosecow had been poignant on a spring day, the Remand Centre was poisonous. A bland, fluoro-lit cavern the size of a small ice-skating rink with ten or twelve cell doors leading off it. The resemblance went further as the 50-odd inmates were going round and round and round. My first impression of this pacing was one of madness. Within the hour , I was up and skating too. There was nothing else to do. A wall TV dwelt in a reinforced box, but the channel and volume were randomly changed if you sat down to watch it. Near as I can tell, this amenity was there purely as a source of entertainment for the screws, or to give them their corrected title, Corrective Services Officers. So there was something below parking cops. These charmers were all about authority. To address them, you pushed a button on the wall in one of the two cells left open (wide open) for their toilets, and spoke to the ceiling. The sight of scruffy supplicants addressing a disembodied voice from above was purposefully disheartening ­­– if they deigned to answer. We fifty were ‘remanded in custody’, which meant at this point there was no discrimination between until-proven-guilty murderers and me. An inmate might offer the background to his unjust and wrongful incarceration, but you didn’t ask. Those who did want to talk about it were invariably in for something relatively minor such as bad luck. I didn’t realize till then that that was illegal. There was no striped uniform, no exercise yard for an hour a day and most disappointing of all the myths to be dispelled, no phone call. A small slot in the door had prisoners chatting singly to someone on the other side, but I missed the importance of it that first day. This someone was a Salvo – our only contact with the outside world. Only *they *could make a call for you. The Salvos were also the only source of clean generic underwear – clean overwear was deemed unnecessary – every third day. They did this out of pious altruism. Or so I thought. The circuits were all the more compulsive as almost every one of us was on the thin ice of nicotine withdrawal, cold turkey. Some, doubtless, were withdrawing from more exclusive and untaxed habits as well – one foot in front of the other… I’m unsure if this fits the criteria for “ resilience of the human spirit” or not, but it amazed me. In that hermetically sealed environment, under the unseen gaze of who knows how many potentially violent career sadists ­ – it couldn’t be – yet yes! Some of the skaters were surreptitiously passing the skinniest of racehorse rollies. It was so thin, it produced almost no smoke and probably very little nicotine, but the pleasure receptors of all those aware of its secret existence were measurably stimulated. Excerpt from unforthcoming book “88 Storeys” xxxe’en