PROCESSING: This is the worst component of the jail experience. It is meant to be humiliating, crowded, unaware of what will happen because of what you do, with lots of people in tears, perhaps drunk or high, perhaps plain mean. The best thing to do is keep to yourself. Be thoughtful but don’t look for anyone to trust to pour your own heart out to or inform your story too. Be delicate, be brief, and keep to yourself.
Then you learn — or don’t learn — depending on how difficult you wish to make it on yourself rapid how to WAIT. You wait for merely everything. Answers mostly. Incredible how everyone abruptly doesn’t know much of everything. You wait to be moved from the first holding cell to another location where there may be thirty or 30 others, one particular toilet for all of you. It may be clogged with whatever, possess vomit all over it, or even it may just work.
Overlook privacy- the toilet has a little wall but can be seen through everyone. Find a spot on the actual bench in the corner if you can. You’ll be in this space, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps on the floor, with people everywhere for 2-4 hours or more. You are going to wait – for your clothing, to use the pay cell phone, for the doctor, for your meals, then your shower, sometimes comfortable, usually cold. Then if you’re ordered to bend more, grab your cheeks and cough. You got your ‘roll-up’ consisting of a cotton jersey shirt, pullover pants, stockings, bra, underwear, rubber open-toe sandal-like shoes (maybe they’ll fit), or painting slip-on.
You got this ‘roll-up’ before the shower, so now, after you have been ‘inspected’ and coughed, you get dressed – 1 piece at a time. The deputies give explicit instructions. Should you have medicines or medical conditions, you will still wait in another holding a mobile phone for perhaps 8 and 10 hours more, all over again, shoulder to shoulder, on the bench, against the wall, on a lawn, you try to sleep whenever you can. When moving from holding cell to positioning cell, you must keep your hands and fingers in your pockets, walk for the colored line, and do just as told by the mouthpiece.
Be nice, smile, and take notes but keep to yourself. If everyone in your group has seen the doctor, you are placed into smaller groups and carefully guided to your “pod,” where you’ll have a cell and sleep for anyone lucky. Congratulations. You got through PROCESSING, and it simply took from 6 to twenty hours (it took twenty-two hours, I remember once while women were housed in Twin Towers in Miss Angeles) to get through it. Bear in mind: the Deputies care nothing at all about efficiency or concerning being polite. Mostly could be mean and cordial but suggestive. And they’ll make you feel stupid and worthless whenever they get you a chance. After all, you are merely a “fish.”
DAILY ROUTINE: After anticipating how long it takes for anyone to see the doctor and finding out where they’ll house you, you’ll be issued a permanent place. You will get a thin mat and a quilt. The mat is to be put on a steel bunk mounted on the wall in your mobile. There are six or several 2-person cells on the bottom floor with an equal quantity of cells on the top floor attached by steel stairs to both sides. There are 5 or 6 iron tables and connecting iron seats where everyone has their particular collective meals.
This is a “pod,” and there are 6 to 8 pods on its side of the floor. Often the deputy has a control presentation area between the isles, having a few or eight pods on one side and the same on the other. That booth is where anything is controlled – entrance doors are electronically opened in addition to shut, announcements are made, and so forth. You will share your mobile phone in the pod with the next behind an electronically operated door in a room that measures about 6′ a 10′. You will have a steel drain and a toilet. It’s primarily calm everywhere, but it isn’t much you can do about it. If the imprisonment is crowded, you won’t get yourself a cell but will be in the public area – the location where the eating tables are on hokum tiered for three folks, and there could be as many as 55 out there with you in addition to each and every cell having two folks in it.
Before going into the pod, you are given a packet containing a new black hair comb, a brush, a small bar of cleaning, a razor, a small package of shampoo, and a modest pencil. You’ll get the money you had on you or get some provided so you can put money with your ‘books’ where you can buy numerous junk food, candy, maybe the eraser or pencil, Bouchon or other “luxuries” in order to have in the highly over-priced list of commodities known as often the jail Commissary. You’ll not imagine so much that everything is around 4x more expensive than on the outside.
Just so you can buy anything to make yourself feel slightly better. Phone calls to your friends and family (this is when you check out love… parents are usually the people to bear the brunt regarding jail expenses between receiving collect phone calls and supplying $10 or $20 with their daughter so she’ll have money on her books). These kinds of ‘collect’ calls are much beyond those made from the outside and will be made to a home-based cellphone; no calls can be manufactured to a cell phone. Calls are usually made when the phones are turned on and only at certain times.
So many who trust their situation is more critical than yours will consult their mom, dad, sis, brother, boyfriend, or anyone to confirm it. You wait in line for any phone and each dish. Depending on where you are or how you would are classified, you may or may not have got to eat breakfast and lunch in addition to dinner, but breakfast is at 6 AM. If you go to judge, you must be awake and able to leave by 3 AM. Primarily though, you wait and hold out and wait…. for just about every little thing. Try to be patient.
Know that company does something they should not necessarily do (like start a struggle or some disturbance), and all of you will pay, usually with a ‘Lock Along. ‘ Know that the deputies can come into your cell any time given moment, tear apart your own personal room and belongings along with lock you down in the event that an extra bra or set of two socks is found. The best thing to do rapidly and it’s much easier said when compared with done – is to only keep cool about it most. Find someone with a common sense of humor and have a good laugh it off. Laugh a good deal if you can. Believe me, you will find a lot of stuff to laugh about if you look at the idea from a certain angle.
Boost the comfort. Exercise. Do not eat a great deal, as weight gain is almost the sure bet. Keep a positive view. Give up your need for personal privacy. Laugh a lot, and when you can. Say nothing which you wouldn’t mind hearing about within a public courtroom. Improve your human relationships with your family and trust ONLY your loved ones to care for your domestic matters. Do not leave financial issues to a boyfriend, a partner or a neighbor.
Cry a great deal if you have to but do it independently. Know you will get through this particular and, most importantly, LEARN precisely what mistakes you made which got you there and what you have to change or do to never have to go back. There is a lot more that could be said, but these would be the basics. Hope this limited “Guidebook to Jail” will help someone to cope. Just know this kind of too shall change, with luck, for the better.