Jail - Processing In

This will be the most detailed entry - partially because it is fresh in my mind - of the whole blog, and probably the most read entry as well. Please let me know if you have any questions as I couldn't find enough information about tent city prior to going, and I want to help others be better prepared.

I'm 14 hours out of jail, as of writing this blog post, and still trying to understand what all just happened, and because I can't yet summarize it, I'm going to go through every little detail here. I hope you have patience or are extremely interested, because I'm about to write stuff that may not even matter to you.

When I was sentenced by the judge, to my three days in jail, she asked me when I wanted to serve them. My lawyer quietly told me that I should do it ASAP, before they amend my sentence to a longer one, before it gets even hotter, and I let him choose the day/time. He chose the following Friday at 9pm, stating that Friday counted as a day, I'd serve all of Saturday, and all of Sunday, and most likely as soon as midnight hit and the clock switched to Monday, I'd be on my way out of there. I put my faith in him, and he turned out to be 100% correct on his scheduling.

I reported at 9pm to the Self-Surrender parking lot at Lower Buckeye Jail (or LBJ as I'll refer to it) with about 25 other people, men and women, who were there for similar things. Everyone had told me this would be harmless jail full of deadbeat dads, DUI offenders, and petty thieves, which I later found out to be completely untrue. I arrived with a trash bag containing a long book, a bath towel, my driver's license, and my confinement order. If you're there over 15 days you'll also need to bring a healthcare certification which is basically a TB test. If you don't bring it, they won't let you do work release and this is not a bluff, as one of my tent-mates didn't bring his and was certain he would lose his job over it.

We were taken almost directly into a holding cell (I'll refer to these as tanks) which was about 20x10 feet, with concrete benches on either side and a toilet in the back. This was, by far, the most uncomfortable room I've ever been in, and I immediately started feeling claustrophobic and nervous. There were some really shifty looking dudes in there, the guy in the next tank over was banging his head into the door and bleeding, it was overcrowded, and it finally sunk in that this was not white-collar resort prison. There were some real characters in my tank, with some interesting stories, some funny jokes, and generally some wild antics. Some of these guys are going to sit in the tank to serve a one-day or 24 hour sentence and will never see tent city, some of them are being processed from/to LBJ and other jails, some are going to go for longer stays in tent city, and some are on their way into Towers, which is the big boy jail of the County Jail complex. There are actually two tent cities, work-release and work furlough, with furlough being the more serious of the two, but they are connected and anyone can walk back and forth between the two.

We spent about 2 hours in the small tank before being escorted to a tank about twice the size, which already had about twice as many people in it, so it was very over crowded. There was a guy in there who had been in work furlough, then in Towers, and now was in the tanks so he could be transferred to work release. I never asked him what he did, but he was so happy not to be in Towers anymore, and had some seriously good info for us. Another guy in the big tank had served 7 years in Towers for undisclosed crimes and was currently serving one day for a DUI. He'd be released before I ever go to the tents as it turned out. We were in the big tank for hours it seemed, waiting for nothing, getting excited every time we heard keys jingling thinking maybe it was time to stretch our legs in the hallway and maybe go somewhere else to sit, but it just kept dragging on. I could only read so much, and play so much cards, and listen to so many stories. I couldn't sleep because there wasn't enough room to stretch out, and I was starting to get anxious again, before a guard showed up and took me and 7 other guys out to go to medical screening. It was now 2am, five hours into this process.

Medical screening was the most excruciating and also the best part of processing, and it was also the most time consuming as far as being in one room. By this point, my new homies and I were all getting thirsty (they wouldn't let us have any bottled water, and the fountains attached to the toilets in the tanks didn't work), hungry, and bored. This medical screening involved getting our blood pressure taken, weighing in, filling out a questionnaire, and basically having some poorly trained, low-iq, bottom run nurse decide whether we were physically fit for the tents. The guy we got was eerily reminiscent of the principal from Billy Madison and asked me if I ever felt victimized, I said no, and he said "it's ok if you like it" which was thoroughly creepy, though it made me feel better that he said the same thing to my 7 homies. The process was about 40 minutes per person, and the sun was coming up long before we got near the end, but at least they kept the tank door open for us so we could watch other inmates, mostly stripes going in and out of Towers, come in and out. There was a group of women who came in at about 5am, and a couple of them were yelling things at us, so it was at least partially entertaining, but at the same time we weren't allowed to leave our tank and we were packed in like sardines.

Before we left medical, we were given breakfast. This consisted of a stale roll shaped like a hot dog bun but not cut, a plastic bag of peanut butter that tastes like watery Jif, a small packet of "jelly" with misspelled words all over it, a packet of cookies, and an orange. This will turn out to be the best meal of the day, and I recommend that if you don't eat it all, SAVE IT. It will come in handy later if you want to sell or trade any of it, or if you get hungry and don't have access to food. One of my homies was putting the peanut butter in between the small wafer cookies and making an oreo-like cookie. I didn't think of that, but it turned out to be a snack that I looked forward to later. I was picking those cookies up out of every bag I saw, placing them into my garbage bag of belongings, planning for later.

After screening, we were taken to another tank, and it was now clear that the 8 of us were going to be friends until one-by-one we were all released. This is where I talked to a guy who was there for extreme DUI who got 3x the sentence I did, a guy who was there for super-extreme and got 11x the sentence I did, another guy who had a lawyer, got an extreme, and was there for two days. It was clear that hiring a lawyer helped not only just me, but just about everyone. Again, it's not about getting out of your crime, it's about mitigating your sentence. The other three were all one-day guys.

The last step of your processing is having your fingerprints done. Once you have your fingerprints done, you can be confident that you're close to being released if you're a one day, or taken to tents if you're a multi day.

Finally, after 18 hours of processing and sitting in concrete tanks, still not having had any water, the three of us who were multi-day inmates, were taken out of the tank, cuffed to each other, legs chained to one another, and escorted to a small and claustrophobic van, and driven to Estrella Women's Jail. Estrella is the gateway to Tent City, but before you get too excited, I'll tell you that all you'll do is get thrown into another tank, but this time, since Estrella is an old jail, it will be a smaller tank with less seating. Here you can watch the girls who are on good behavior working in the laundry room, as well as the girls going in and out of the jail. After 20 hours in small rooms with a lot of guys, you'll look forward to seeing someone of the opposite sex, and having a chance to talk to them.

Finally - 20 hours in - some jackass guard came in and walked us a half-mile to Tent City. I had never been so happy to get out of anywhere in my life. I just wanted to sit on a bed, even if it was a shitty bed, and maybe even lay down. I just stayed up all night and wanted to rest. I was prepared for processing to take up to 8 hours, but my total processing time from self-surrender to getting to my tent was 20 hours.