Читать книгу Prison Puzzle Pieces 2 - Dave Basham - Страница 29

There were a lot of policies that I didn’t agree with. It was not my place to pick and choose. If it was a policy, it was my responsibility to enforce it.

Take the headboard policy for instance. Inmates would take the lid off their footlocker and set it against the angle iron on the end of their bunk that holds their bunk on the wall. They would put their pillow up against it. The lid would hold the pillow in place so they could lean against it for comfort while they read a book, watched TV or whatever else.

It would keep their pillow from falling off the end of the bed at night. I know that without a headboard at home, I would be losing my pillow to the floor many times during the night.

Keep in mind too that these pillows are nothing you would ever qualify as a pillow. They were flat and firm. They were plastic with a little bit of cottony type filling. They were about 3 inches thick.

These guys would stuff blankets, coats, clothes any soft thing they could find into the pillow case with their pillow to try to make it comfortable. Some would steal another pillow or two to help out. Some would rip the pillow open and stuff other items in it. By stealing another pillow or altering the one they had, they could face charges.

Granted, these people are not put in this place to have all the comforts of those outside these walls, but I saw no benefit to how this situation was handled.

If we are trying to keep things chilled out in this place, having an inmate not get a good night sleep is not the way to achieve this. They are not happy to be here. A tired inmate is a cranky inmate; more than usual anyway.

I enforced these policies. The inmates will tell you that nobody enforced them more aggressively than I did. It was a priority for the big shots. If the big shots came through and saw headboards up and extra pillows in cells, we would get heat. It was better for the inmates and the officers if the big shots did not see these things when they came into the unit.

The best I could do to keep the bosses off our case was to enforce policies, especially those that stuck out to them easily when they came in the cell block.

I believe that the reason for this policy was for better vision into the cell. However, I only had one instance where anyone tried to hide behind a headboard. It didn’t work. His afro protruded above it. It was actually laughable.

Have I stated that I flat out hated enforcing this policy; that I found it one of the most counterproductive policies to keeping peace in the institution? If I were locked up in this place, this would be a policy that I would violate; however, I would violate it after the big shots had left for the day.