'Right. School colours. Probably some urban planner's idea of what soothes the savage breast.' The phone rang. He picked it up, talked about moving Cochran from 7100 to 4500, made inquiries about a leg abscess on Lopez and Boutillier's need for twenty-four-hour nursing, put the receiver down, and stood up.
'If you're ready, we can check out the campus. Then I'll take you to see your client.'
He took me to the inpatient unit first - thirty-five isolation rooms set aside for inmates with profound psychiatric problems. Five were marked COED and had been set aside for women, but men occupied three of them. Visual access was provided through a mesh window in the door of each room. A scrap of paper identifying the prisoner was taped below the window. Some of the papers bore coded messages as well.
The codes, explained Montez, referred to inmate characteristics that demanded staff vigilance: suicidal tendencies, drug addiction, unpredictability, mental retardation, assaultiveness, medical abnormalities, and physical handicaps - as in the case of die toothless double amputee in the first room I viewed, who stood on his knee stumps and stared at the floor. The code said he was unusually explosive.
The social worker encouraged me to look at the prisoners, and I did, despite some unease at being intrusive. The rooms were tiny - six-by-four. Each one contained a bed and a steel commode and nothing else. Most of the inmates lay on the beds wrapped in jumbled sheets. A few slept; others stared desolately into space. In one of the coed rooms I saw a black woman squatting on the commode. Before I could look away, our eyes met, and she grinned defiantly, spread her legs, stretched, and stroked her labia while licking her lips. A glance into another cell revealed a three-hundred-pound white man festooned with tattoos standing catatonically rigid, hands held over his head, eyes glazed over. Next door to him, a coal-coloured youth with sculpted musculature and a shaved bullet head paced and worked his mouth nonstop. Soundproofing silenced the message, but I read his lips: Fuckyoufuckmefuckyoufuckme, over and over, like a catechism.
When I told him I'd seen enough, Montez took me off the unit and back to the elevator. While we waited, I asked him why Jamey wasn't in one of the inpatient rooms.
'He's been judged too dangerous. They put him on the High Power unit, which I'll explain later.'
The elevator came, and we boarded. Montez punched a number and rode slouching against the door.
'What do you think so far?' he asked.
'Strong stuff.'
'What you just saw was the Hilton. Every lawyer wants his client in one of those rooms, and inmates are always faking craziness to get there because it's safe - no one gets cut or raped - which isn't the case on cellblock.'
'Seven thousand applicants for thirty-five spaces,' I reflected. 'A seller's market.'
'You bet. More exclusive than Harvard.'
As we neared the hub of the jail, the silence that had characterised the isolation unit was replaced by a low, insectile hum. Montez had used the word campus, and strangely enough, the academic analogy seemed superficially fitting - wide, bright corridors teeming with young people and bustling with activity, the energy level reminiscent of a university during registration week.
But the walls of this college were grungy and permeated with a stale, masculine stench, and there was nothing bright-eyed about its students. We walked past scores of stone-faced men, enduring a gauntlet of cold, radar stares.
The prisoners walked freely, and we were in their midst, unprotected.
They stood around singly or in small groups, wearing royal blue jump suits. Some walked purposefully, clutching sheafs of paper. Others slumped listlessly in plastic chairs or waited in line for cigarettes and candy. From time to time a uniformed deputy could be seen strolling and surveilling, but the inmates vastly outnumbered the guards, and I could see nothing to prevent the confined from overpowering their keepers and tearing them - and us - to shreds.
Montez saw the look on my face and nodded.
'I told you it was a hell of a system. Held together by prayer and spit.'
We walked on. It was a young man's world. Most of the inmates were under twenty-five. The guards looked scarcely older. A profusion of bulky shoulders and bulging biceps. I knew what that meant: plenty of hard time. Pumping iron was a favourite prison yard pastime.
The prisoners clustered along racial lines. The majority were black. I saw lots of Rasta dreadlocks, cornrows, and shaved skulls, a plethora of shiny, keloid knife scars on dusky flesh. Second largest in number were the Latinos -smaller but just as husky, sporting bandanna-bound homeboy pompadours, devilish goatees, and vato loco swaggers. Whites were in the minority. For the most part they were biker types - hulking, bearded lugs with hog jowls, earrings, and greasy forearms blued with Iron Cross tattoos.
Despite their differences they had one thing in common: the eyes. Cold and dead, immobile yet piercing. I'd seen eyes like that recently but couldn't quite remember where.
Montez took me to a general population cellblock where most of the cells were empty - we'd just seen their occupants - and then to a twenty-four-hour lockup full of wild.
gaunt men in yellow pyjamas who tore at their faces and paced like zoo animals. A single deputy watched balefully from a glass rectangle suspended midway between the two tiers of the block. He saw us and unlocked the door.
Stepping into the booth, I felt like a diver in a shark cage. Soul music blasted the block from multiple speakers. Even in the booth it was loud. I thought of a recent article in a psych journal about the effects of constant high-volume noise on rats: The rodents had grown initially agitated, then had withdrawn into a passive psychotic- like state. I looked at the pacing men in yellow and wondered for the thousandth time about the relevance of animal research to the human condition.
A console of electronic equipment lined one wall. Above it was a rack holding two shotguns. Below, an inmate in a khaki jump suit pushed a mop over the soapy cement floor.
'Trustee?' I asked.
'Right. Everything's colour-coded. Blue is mainline; khaki means trustee; transport trustees have red armbands; kitchen trustees wear white. These guys in yellow are psych cases. They never leave their cells.'
'How are they different from the ones on the inpatient ward?'
'Officially they're supposed to be less disturbed, but it's really arbitrary.'
The deputy spoke up. He was short and stocky with a tobacco-coloured military moustache and a seamed face.
'If they're really motivated, we punt 'em over to inpatient, right, Patrick?'
Montez responded to his laughter with a faint smile.
'What he means,' the social worker explained, 'is they have to do something outrageous - bite off a finger, eat a pound of their own excrement - to get off block.'
As if on cue, one of the prisoners on the upper tier stripped off his pyjamas and began masturbating.
'No dice, Rufus,' muttered the guard, 'we are not impressed.' He turned to Montez and chatted for a few minutes about movies. The naked prisoner reached orgasm
and ejaculated through the bars. Nobody paid attention, and he slumped to the floor, panting.
'Anyway,' said Montez, moving toward the door, 'check it out, Dave, it's not Truffaut, but it's a good piece of cinema.'
'Will do, Patrick. Where you headed?'
'Taking the doctor over to High Power.'
The deputy looked at me with renewed interest.
'Gonna try to dim cap one of those clowns?' he asked.
'I don't know yet.'
'Cadmus,' said Montez.
The deputy snorted.
'Fat chance,' he said, and pushed a button that released a pnuematic lock.
'This,' said Montez, 'is the top of the line as far as bad guys go-'
We were standing in front of an unmarked locked door monitored by two closed-circuit TV cameras. To the left was the attorney interview room. Lawyers and clients sat opposite one another at a series of partitioned tables. To their rear were several private glass-walled rooms.
'High Power is reserved for highly publicised cases, high-risk-for-escape types, and real monsters. Shoot the
