At 21, the big house
always wins.

17 July 2001—200 inmates on lockdown. One technician on duty. A scheduled visitor made to wait half an hour while the on-duty deputy finishes his lunch in the cafeteria, an hour before he’s set to go home for the day. In other words, the game remained the same today in Housing Unit 21 of the jail.

In an ideal situation, there would be a technician (someone who controls the doors, lights, etc.) and two deputies on duty at all times in every housing unit. In reality, there is a shortage of people who want to work as guards at the jail. The result is quite unfortunate for the inmates. In the maximum-security setting, housing units are arranged into six “pods,” each pod containing approximately 30 inmates, two to a cell measuring maybe 100 square feet (and that’s probably a liberal estimate). “Pod time” denotes a period of a few hours in which inmates may leave their cells and roam the common area of their pod, a room roughly the size of a playground basketball court containing a television, tables, and phones from which only collect calls may be made. Aside from pod time, mealtime, and whatever classes/Bible study/support groups each inmate is allowed to go to, inmates are on lockdown, often with annoying music blasted into the pods.

Inmates are supposed to have pod time twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, but beginning a couple of years ago, due to the staff shortage, the jail went on a confusing schedule of alternating days and weeks. Pod time was now once a day, morning one day, evening the next. Some days inmates are on lockdown all day if deputies don’t make it to work or not enough are scheduled. I once had a learner who said he hadn’t had a shower in three days.

It’s like a vicious game where the person who made it up keeps changing the rules to suit his needs.

It took a while, but the tutoring program for which I volunteer, run by the Alameda County Library, seems to have firmly established itself at the jail. This doesn’t mean that the deputies welcome me with open arms when I show up each week; many are simply professional about their job and treat me with a guarded acceptance. A few, however, are less than cordial; one deputy once told me that he couldn’t understand why inmates should receive tutoring for free, while he had to pay for a tutor for his son. It wasn’t worth the antagonism for me to suggest to him that perhaps his son had many more opportunities open to him than the inmate I was working with had had at his son’s age. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t be at Santa Rita. I had held my tongue, which is unusual for me; I didn’t want it to negatively affect the presence of the program.

I’ve started to lose my patience. At Housing Unit 21, a medium-security population in a maximum-style house, the deputies and technicians seem bent on making everything difficult for both inmates and visitors. I can’t be let into the unit without both a deputy and a technician in the house, and given the fact that I’m scheduled to be there at certain times, that particular alignment of the stars is rare. I have to coax, cajole, and sweet-talk technicians into finding me a deputy who can join us briefly so that I can meet with my learner. No one I’ve met at the jail thinks to go out of his or her way to make the environment conducive to helping inmates gain skills that might help them to avoid returning to Santa Rita.

If it weren’t usually so much fun to do the tutoring itself, I’d probably give the whole thing up. So I try to let it wash over me, but hostility from the deputies is becoming more pronounced. Last week, as we were walking out of the unit, I asked the deputy, whom I will call Deputy Balding Crewcut so that I don’t get myself into a libelous situation, how he was. “Great,” he said. “I carry a gun and can legally shoot and kill people.” “Nice,” I replied quietly. “What was that?” Deputy Crewcut asked. “I said, ‘Nice.’” I didn’t think until later to ask, do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

(An aside: when I was growing up in Los Angeles, I recall a few things about the police: I remember an officer coming to my third-grade class to talk about his job. He painted the picture of a police officer as someone you could turn to for help. A few years later, the police gave out trading cards of officers, the idea being that we would collect them like baseball cards, which we didn’t but still thought the cards were kind of cool. I guess I generally had a positive impression of the police back then. At Berkeley, however, I was made aware of the brutality and disproportionate aggression against communities of people of color. I learned to be mistrustful of the police and wondered if my positive memories had been just the public relations face shown to a middle-class white audience, so that we wouldn’t notice or question tactics used in other parts of the city. As I began my tutoring at the jail, I was hoping to have my negative prejudices about the police challenged. Generally, though I’ve met a few good deputies, they haven’t.)

Today Deputy Final Four was on duty. I’ve assigned him this name because one Sunday, he wanted my learner, James, and me to work in the lunch area rather than in one of the private multi-purpose rooms that we always work in. “Why do you have to be in the multi?” he wanted to know. Again, it’s hard to explain to someone who is unsympathetic to our aims that scrutiny by dozens of one’s fellow inmates can make a learner self-conscious. “It’s just better to have privacy,” I said. To my surprise he finally relented, letting us use the multi we usually used. He took a chair out of the multi for himself. It wasn’t until I left the unit that day that I understood: he wanted to watch the basketball playoffs, which he did in the other multi, where there hadn’t been any chairs. But I digress. Today when I got to the house, the technician told me he didn’t have his deputy in the house, and he didn’t know when Deputy Final Four would be coming back.

I waited half an hour, making the most of my time by drafting the outline of this essay. When the deputy finally came back, my learner and I only had 45 minutes to work together. I’ve started speaking up: my coordinator will hear about this episode. It will be the eighth or ninth complaint I’ve made about this unit since I started going there a few months ago. The complaints are only for the more egregious episodes.

It’s almost over, however: James will be moving on to state prison in a couple of weeks to serve the remainder of his time, and that will be it for me and Housing Unit 21, at least for a while. Another house may yield a better situation. I’ll miss James, but I won’t miss playing the game every week. The big house always wins.