In this case…real-life legal stories

FIRST-PERSON….I had to go to jail because in 1998 I got a DWI, and then last April I got pulled over after a couple of beers. When you have a prior these days, they’re much more harsh about drinking and driving. The penalty could have been one year in jail if I had gone to trial and lost. My lawyer said, your best bet is to plead and take the DC mandatory, five days in jail. I pleaded and took the five days. It’s not a full five days, it’s called a weekend. You go at seven at night on a Friday and you’re released on Tuesday morning at seven. Leading up to my weekend I read about the DC jail, about the people that have died there and the mayhem that goes on there, and I got pretty nervous. I read one article about the lawsuits that are pending for people that were left in there and forgotten about. For days, weeks, months….

I got there at seven o’clock; a friend met me there. We walked to the guard tower where you’re supposed to sit and wait. They curse at you, sit there and wait, motherfucker. We were just sitting there. Most of the people got in, except for me and one other guy. The guards were sitting in the guard tower screaming at me, we don’t have your paperwork….We waited for about two hours. I was thinking they lost my paperwork….The other guy was screaming, please let me in, I don’t want to miss this. They ended up finding our names about nine o’clock and we went inside.

When you get inside there’s this room enclosed in bulletproof glass. There’s a few COs there, corrections officers. They’re processing guys. They get your name, they hand you whatever paperwork you have. I gave them my cell phone. I had two dollars in my pocket. Then you sit in a holding cell. I was with 40, 50 other guys. It’s about 99% black men, most in their twenties, some teenagers. From all walks of life. And everyone is miserable. No room to sit. Filthy. It’s filthy. Roaches. You can see them crawling on the walls. It’s nasty. I was in this room for six or seven hours. I lost complete track of time. No clocks anywhere. A bunch of TVs, loud as hell, and these guys are processing people, very slowly, the whole time. I’m sure it was by design. It was part of psychologically breaking us down.

Then your name is called and you walk into this other room where you strip down and spread your cheeks and lift your sack. It’s degrading, but that happens, you know. It’s to make sure you don’t have any contraband. Then you get your orange jumpsuit and your slip-ons. They give you a bedroll. It’s got a sheet in it, some wool blankets, a couple of t-shirts, two pairs of extra-large underwear, a couple pairs of socks, and a toiletries kit. You hold on to that stuff with your life for the next number of hours until you get to your cell. Hours and hours and hours. I mean, it was the next day, it was Saturday sometime, who knows. You do not sleep the whole time. It was crazy. They take your picture. They give you a wristband. You’re in a bunch of little rooms, and it’s motherfucker this and motherfucker that….

And then we were all in another holding cell waiting to go to the infirmary. I found a newspaper on the floor, El Tiempo. I don’t read Spanish well at all, but I held onto it like it was a Bible or something because the alternative was nothing to read at all. Other guys were just kind of sleeping, because it had finally quieted down. People opened up a little bit. You don’t want to open up too much. There’s guys from all walks of life in jail, some who are going to the federal penitentiary. When a guy’s facing 15 or 20 years and you’re facing a weekend, and you piss him off, what does he care if he kicks your ass? Rapes you, kills you? So I was keeping quiet. We waited for hours. Eventually, who knows what time it was, they took us to the infirmary.

They do a psychological test to check that you’re mentally stable. An AIDS test, a TB test. There’s a big desk, and there’s one CO waving guys in, and they’re constantly doing head counts to make sure they don’t lose anyone. The guards were pretty overwhelmed and confused. And understaffed. If something went down, someone could easily get hurt before anyone really responds. And then I could hear on all the radios, Code Blue, and about an hour or two later they were wheeling in this guy on a stretcher with blood all over him. He was strapped down, knocked out, blood all over him. I’m like, man, this is lawless. One CO got accidentally locked in the holding cell with us. There was dead silence in the room; he was pretty scared. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen. What if he was killed that night, right there? There were guys in that holding cell for attempted murder and this corrections officer was all alone. Complete lawlessness.

Then to Northwest Three. That was our wing. They just threw me in the cell and shut the door, and no one said anything, and that was it. You don’t talk to anyone about your specific situation until they release you. No one says, okay, you’re in Northwest Three. You’re a weekender, and we know this, and you’re due to be out at this time…. You’re just praying the whole time, is this right? You really lose your sense of direction in the jail. It’s a big building, with all these wings and stuff. You look around, and you don’t know which way is north…. It’s weird. The cell window wasn’t a real window. You can’t even look out. You can see the light of the sun rising, but it’s smoked in a way that you can’t see anything, and it’s like, god, this really sucks. It’s just something that you naturally want to know, where you are. And I couldn’t make a phone call. There were phones. But you had to have a code or something. I didn’t get a code. The other guy I was with didn’t get a code. We were trying to use the phones, and I asked one of the COs, and they were like, do you have a pin number motherfucker? And I said, no, and they said, you can’t use the phone, get back in your cell, motherfucker nigger.

Everyone there was a repeat offender, and everyone knew that I was a new guy. This is a local jail. A lot of the guys know each other, that’s how these local jails are. If you’re new, if you don’t know the routine, you stand out like a sore thumb. Other people knew what to do. I had a puzzled look on my face half the time….In the Inmate Handbook it says that within a certain time frame a counselor is supposed to explain to you what’s going on. You’re going to go here, you’re going to be strip-searched, they’re going to do these tests, and then you’re going to go to your cell, and this is why, et cetera et cetera. No. Doesn’t happen. When you’re in there, when you’re going through that maze, no one explains to you what’s going on. No one says anything to you about anything. This is the scary thing. People just screaming motherfucker nigger at you, and then they throw you in your cell, and that’s it.

I was just miserable. If, God forbid, I ever have to go back there, I would demand protective custody. When you’re out of your cell, there is definitely tension. A lot of sexual tension, guys walking around with their shirts off checking each other out. There were stories about rapings. And a lot of cursing at each other, a lot of fuck you motherfucker and fuck that and fuck him and mother fucker this and that. There’s a little inside basketball area with a hoop. There’s a guard tower, a bunch of metal benches. And then there’s the TV, which has bad reception and you can’t hear. You just sit there and watch the whole time. Just sit there. And keep in constant view of the COs, and have them in your view, or have yourself in their view. That was my main goal. I don’t want to go back to that place every again. When I was talking to my probation officer, I was like, please don’t send me back there because they’ll kill me. It’s bad.

Monday night I didn’t sleep a wink. I was really nervous about not getting out Tuesday morning. And it was motherfucker nigger all night, banging on cell doors, screaming….I was pacing all night. Literally, I’m pacing in this little area. Just thinking, god, I hope they can get me out. That’s all that was in my mind. Then finally, I guess about six o’clock, our cell door opened. Then It took us an hour or two to get out of there. We ended up back in the holding cell. Waiting, waiting. One of the guys told me a story as we were waiting….He had to do two other weekends. When he went in for his first weekend, there were five weekenders, and they all went in together. On the way out that next Tuesday morning, there were four. The weekenders all said, you forgot this guy, you forgot this guy! And actually, the COs said they did forget him. They really did forget someone! You have to be on top of them, because they’ll forget about you and you’ll be in there for days.

My cellmate and I did a lot of reflecting in there. Just about jail, and about the people in there. It was really, really weird, seeing so many black men in there. In the mid-60s there were 98,000 black men in prison. Today, it’s 980,000. It is incredible. And they keep going back. They keep going back. What’s rehabilitative about that? What was I really learning there? I was thinking, you know what I’d love to read? I’d love to read some DWI cases. I’d love to read about what happens in DWI law, read about people who were killed. That was on my mind the whole time. They should have sent me in there with a stack of cases and said, here, this is your reading. This is the statute that you broke. Give me a printout of the statute I broke so I can read over it 10 or 15 times. Instead, it’s just back to your cell, motherfucker.

“Casey” lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. He is a law student and works in politics; his name has been changed to protect his identity. His story is awful, but other inmates from the DC Jail could tell worse. Over the years some have died. (City Paper, Washington Post, Examiner) As Casey feared, many have been “over-detained”–wrongly imprisoned–months past their date of release. Two class-action lawsuits have been brought by groups of “over-detained” inmates; the city has settled one. Numerous agencies, watchdog organizations, and media outlets have reported serious issues of overcrowding, staff hostility, and a non-functioning inmate grievance system.

Flickr photo “jail” by 710928003.