Once a week inmates are allowed visitors in a highly controlled section of the jail. You can only talk through across the window, with your visitor on the other side of the glass, with a telephone. Of the 30 inmates in my pod, about a third got visitors. Sometimes it's a loved one, sometimes it's a lawyer. I had neither a loved one nor a lawyer to visit me. O woe is .... (oh, shut up already!) It’s not always a welcome visit. A wife who wants a divorce, or a lawyer who says your case is hopeless.
While inmates are on a visit guards will often come in a do a random cell search, looking for "contraband". You might be thinking of weapons, drugs, and so on. But the overwhelming majority of the time contraband was just extra food from the lunch tray. Seriously; almost always just food. All food had to be eaten and none could be saved as a snack for later on, especially fruits. Eat them or lose them. Why no fruits allowed in the cell? Because it theoretically could be used to make "prison hooch", homemade alcohol, when fermented with a slice of bread!
So Rob was on a visit. He was in his 40s. He had been there months before I arrived, fighting his case. He was still there 8 months later when I went to prison. He had a corner cell exactly like this one, cell number 9! I'm astounded I found a picture that is nearly identical to that corner cell! And with that damn TV in the corner. How I hated that TV! Grrrr.
But the guard came in to do a cell search, and not surprisingly chose cell number 9. His cell was searched more often than anyone else as I recall. Rob had some money on his books, and bought a huge lot of stuff, mostly junk food, and used his precious coffee to trade for all kinds of extra food and sugar. So many of my sugars, meats, puddings, and cookies went to that man for his precious coffee, or sometimes writing paper! He had an enormous appetite but burned all that in his frenetic walking around and around that pod every day, every day. I'm a daily walker, and no one walked more than me ... except maybe for him. But he always walked as if he was late for an important meeting. It wasn't a brisk walk; it was an urgent walk. It had the feel of desperation about it, as if trying to catch up with someone far up ahead. It's later that he told me that he might be facing life in prison. He'd been around the block before, and had been out on parole, but screwed up and maybe was coming back for good, as in for life.
Wearing blue gloves, the guard, a portly man, started searching Rob's cell. No telling what he would find. Other inmates were sitting around the tables, watching. Just as he began his search, two inmates at one table started running off their mouths yelling "check cell 5 - check cell 5 - he's got all the contraband!" That got the CO's attention.
Meanwhile, the guy in cell 5 had been napping, and heard some commotion in the day room but didn't know what was going on. He got up, slightly dazed, took a piss, and then .... he flushed! OMG, he flushed the toilet!
A word about prison toilets.
You have never heard a proper toilet flush until you've heard a prison toilet flush! It's a marvel of heavy-duty engineering, specially designed for prisons. Crafted to withstand all sorts of abuse and the flushing mechanism is industrial strength with a siphon that could rip an arm off. The sound is jet-engine loud.
The two inmates yelled some more, "He's flushing ... he's flushing! check cell 5!" The point is that if you do have contraband, and you need to get rid of it quickly, sometimes the toilet is the fastest way to rid yourself of it.
And sure enough, the blue-gloved CO rushed to cell 5 shining his searchlight on the dazed and confused inmate just standing there, like the proverbial deer caught in headlights, on the other side of the windowed door. He asked, "What the hell are you flushing there?" The inmate was alarmed and confused and meekly stammered, "I just took a leak and flushed the toiler, sir". He shouted back, "Are you hiding any pills up your ass?"
Now the inmate was no longer alarmed. He was terrified! Was this a presage to a "body cavity" search? This is perhaps one of the most humiliating things that can happen to an inmate. He had experienced it once, and once was enough. The "squat and cough" routine. I’ll spare you the details, but you can find them here:
This nice young man demonstrates how it’s meant to be done, courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
But the video does not work. Too alarming maybe?
The guard saw the inmate was scared; his face was paper-white, his eyes wide open, shaking his head, emphatically saying "No sir - I have no pills, sir"; and then the guard suddenly grinned from ear to ear and said "ha! ha! I'm just messing with you!" and walked away, as the onlooking inmates laughed hysterically, and the guard left the pod.
Everyone was laughing, except for me, because I was that guy in cell number 5!
….
Now, that might seem a malicious thing to do, not so much from the guard, but from the inmates to deliberately draw the CO's attention to my cell to give me such a scare. But I quickly learned that was the point - not to give me a scare, but to divert the guard's attention away from Rob's cell and to my cell since the others knew that I had no contraband. They knew that because one of the guys shouting was my cellie, TJ, (before he went to the hole)! But if anyone had contraband (like hidden fruits, cookies, or whatever), it would be Rob. He had a ton of commissary items, which is allowed but intermixed with disallowed stuff like cookies, puddings, and fruits. He often stashed his stuff more or less disguised in potato chip bags which might escape notice, depending on how aggressive the search might be (and some guards were more thorough than others. Some hardly cared, but others treated a cell search like a treasure hunt and had to find something, no matter what. Success! I confiscated contraband cookies!)
Whether or not the guard would have searched Rob's cell more thoroughly had it not been for this little diversion is hard to say. This guard was liked, and already known for his easy-going attitude to begin with (many guards are quite decent). An apple too obviously sitting on the table he might feel obliged to confiscate, but other food items more discreetly tucked away, a guard might choose to ignore.
Prison guards are not fools. He might have known it was a diversion, but welcomed it himself and decided to play along since he was, after all, basically "in" on the joke, even if at my expense.
I've always thought this incident interesting, almost surreal. When you think about it, it's about a prison guard and some inmates spontaneously conspiring to play a little joke - a little prank - on one of the other inmates! Oddly, I felt more human because of this strange event!
The CO's just barging in during the middle of the night, or even Sunday church service (yep, it's happened a few times!) to do searches and what not is just more of a slap in our faces. I vaguely remember one Sunday afternoon during "church", we were interrupted as the CO came into the dayroom and started looking under all of the tables/stools for any apples or oranges that were placed there from breakfast/lunch that morning. The preacher even stopped what he was doing, just watching the CO, then looked at all of us and said, "I'm sorry for that." They're [COs] basically saying "We can do whatever the heck we want, you're scum, deal with it!"
I remember one day I was "racked" for 24 hours because a CO searched the cell I was in, and I had 1 too many books. Can you believe that?! Being disciplined for having an extra book. How petty is that?
I have very mixed feelings on Rob. On on hand, I believe he would use anyone to his advantage that he could manipulate. He tried to act like the "Pod Boss" on numerous occasions. However, it was interesting seeing him in Fulton. Not sure if you were aware or not, but he "checked-in". I was surprised to see him in 4-A one morning. During chow, while mixed with other inmates, he looked more scared to be there than I was!