wanting it to be over.
When the opaque door opened, I was looking at a young Hispanic man in civilian clothes - pale blue shirt and blue-green tartan tie under a sleeveless maroon V-neck sweater, grey corduroy slacks, crepe-soled buckskin oxfords. A picture ID card clipped to the collar of the shirt said he was a social worker. He was tall, narrow, and long-limbed. Glossy brush-cut hair capped a long, pale face. Large, elfin ears created a striking resemblance to Mr. Spock that didn't dissipate when he spoke: His voice was flat, as emotionless as Morse code.
'Dr. Delaware, I'm Patrick Montez. I'm supposed to orient you. Please come with me.'
On the other side of the door was a wide, empty yellow corridor. As we entered it, one of the deputies in the glass booth stuck his head out and scanned the hallway in both directions. Montez took me to an elevator. We rose several flights and exited into more glossy yellow, trimmed with blue. I caught a glimpse of rumpled hospital beds through an open door at the end of the corridor.
'My office is over there,' he said, pointing across the hall.
A slatted wooden bench ran the length of the wall outside the office. Two men in yellow pyjamas sat slumped at opposite ends. The nearer one was a squat dark Mexican in his sixties with rummy eyes and a fallen face. The other was a young man with a full head of surfer-blond curls -tan, muscular and scarcely out of his teens. His face was male-model perfect except for the tics that caused his
features to jump like Galvani's frog. As we passed, the wino looked away. But the blond boy turned toward us. Something feral slithered into his eyes, and his mouth twitched into a snarl.
Suddenly he strained to rise. I looked quickly at Montez, but he seemed unperturbed. The blond boy grunted and raised his buttocks an inch from the bench before snapping back sharply, as if forced down rudely by an invisible hand. Then I saw the shackles around his wrists - metal cuffs chained to stationary bolts running through the bench seat.
A deputy appeared, nightstick in hand. The blond boy cried out gutturally. The deputy stood watch from a distance as the prisoner slammed his back several times against the slats, then sank back down, breathing hard and mouthing silent obscenities.
'Come on in, Doctor,' said Montez, as if nothing had happened. He took out a ring of keys, unlocked the door, and held it open.
The interior of the office was standard county issue: desk chairs and table of grey-painted metal; a corkboard pinned with layers of official documents. The room was window-less and ventilated by a ceiling fan. A table beside the desk held a thriving potted devil's ivy and a police scanner that hissed and spat until the social worker leaned over and turned it off.
'This is the largest jail system in the world,' he said. 'Official maximum capacity is fifty-one hundred inmates. Right now we've got seventy-three hundred. On a good weekend, when the city really gets down to partying, we process sixteen thousand.'
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a roll of Life Savers.
'Want one?'
'No thanks.'
He popped a candy into his mouth and sucked on it.
'You're a psychologist?'
'Right.'
'In theory there are two parallel systems here: mental health and custody. We're supposed to work together. In
actuality mental health is a guest. The jail is run by the sheriff's department, and the main emphasis is on processing and maintaining criminals. Psychiatric input is viewed as another tool to make that work.'
'Makes sense,' I said.
He nodded.
'I start out with that spiel because I always get questions from mental health people about our treatment philosophy, modes of therapy - all that good stuff. The truth of it is this is a giant corral: We lock them up and work at keeping them alive and reasonably healthy until trial. Even if we had time for psychotherapy, I doubt it would help most of our guys. About fifteen percent are seriously psychiatrically disturbed - more impaired than the patients at County Hospital. Bona fide psychotics who're also murderers, rapists, armed robbers. If you include your everyday ambulatory sociopath - guys judged to be too dangerous to be released on bail - triple that figure. On top of that are the derelicts and gomers who do something especially outrageous and can't make ten percent of a seventy-five-dollar bail. Most of them are head cases, too.'
'Do you medicate them?'
'If the inmate has a private psychiatrist who's willing to administer and monitor dosages - like Cadmus - he gets medicated. Otherwise no. We're not staffed for it - one part-time psychiatrist who comes in once in a while and a handful of nurses for the entire jail. The deputies aren't qualified to handle it.'
I considered the notion of a thousand or so mentally disturbed felons cooped up without treatment and asked how long the average stay was.
'Usually it's days, not weeks. Again, it's a matter of processing; we have to move out as many as we move in or there'd be no place to put 'em. As is, we've got inmates sleeping on the roof in the summer and in the aisles when it cools down. Once in a while you come across someone who should have been released a month ago but wasn't because the paper work got lost and his lawyer was incompetent. Plenty of attorneys do a lot of screaming and filing of writs,
but they don't understand the system and end up causing more trouble for their clients.'
'Plenty but not all,' I said.
He smiled and clicked the Life Saver against his teeth.
'Two hours ago an order came down from on high to give you the grand tour. Now here we are. That should tell you something about Mr. Souza's influence.'
'I appreciate your spending the time.'
'No problem. Gives me a little respite from paper work.'
He chewed the candy and swallowed it, took another from the roll. The ensuing silence was punctuated by a loud scream, followed by several more. Several hard thumps vibrated the wall behind us - the slatted bench being pushed repeatedly against the plaster. More screams, a blizzard of running footsteps, the whisper of a scuffle, and all was calm. Montez had sat through it without moving a muscle.
'Back to lockup for Mark,' he said.
'The blond kid?'
'Yup. Comes up for trial next week. Seemed to be calming down. You never know.'
'What did he do?'
'Ate a lot of PCP and tried to decapitate his girlfriend.'
'A guy like that doesn't get locked in a cell?'
'He came in too disturbed and too pretty to be put on cellblock, too healthy for the infirmary. We have a thirty-five-room inpatient unit - isolation rooms for prisoners too iffy for general custody - and we stuck him there, but when he started to get lucid, we moved him out to make room for someone crazier and put him on the ward. Ward patients get to move around under supervision. He started to look a little 'spacey this morning, so they cuffed him. Obviously he's' slipping again - pretty typical for a duster. He belongs back in isolation, but we've got no vacancies, so he'll have to go to a cellblock with twenty-four-hour lockup. If an empty room comes up, he'll be moved back here.'
'Sounds like juggling,' I said.
'With live grenades. But don't take that to mean it's a shlocky system. The public wants bad guys caught and put
away, but no one wants to pay for a place to put 'em. Considering the situation, this is probably the best-run system in the country. You've got enough violent offenders to populate a small city, and despite that, things go smoothly. Take initial processing, for example. When a guy comes in, we've got to find out if he's a member of a street gang or a prison gang to know where to put him. Some gangs coexist; others will rip each other apart on sight. Until recently we didn't even have a computer, but screwups were rare. If they weren't, there'd be blood in the halls, and last I checked, things still looked pretty yellow.'
'And blue.' I smiled.
