Tales from the North Platte Jail

Ten days for a DUI commited in December of 2003. I had returned to college the week before, so I did my time over Spring Break in March 2004. Eight days in all, from exactly 7PM. on Friday to 7 PM on the next Saturday. One day's credit for the eighteen hours after my arrest, one day off for good behavior.

I brought my backpack full of schoolbooks when I checked in but wasn't allowed to bring them inside. The jail had it's own library, they explained. This library included year-old copies of Newsweek, fifty-year-old religious tracks, a newsletter for Christian inmates, and a smattering of women's romance paperbacks and third-rate adventure novels. I read a fictionalized account of the adventures of Cuthburt Grant and some bible passages.

My cellmates included a wife-beater, a man named Luke who I had met a time or two before was awaiting trial for raping two eighty-year old women. He had a tatoo on his neck that said "Get at me Dog" which is a line from a lesser-known DMX song. He would leer over me (that's the only word for it) while I played solitare.
Three different thirty-something men locked up for meth-related offenses for the seventh or eighth time, one of them constantly whined about how he would rather be in prison, (TV, better food.) one of them was released the day before I was and killed an old man while drunk driving a month after that. Another wife beater, and another one. A man who had gotten out of prison for selling heroin after seven years and than violated his parole by stealing a five-dollar handbag from the mall. Another wife-beater, he would write three or four letters to his wife per day (Forever baby) and call her another three or four times. She was pregnant with his child, he looked like a naked mole rat that lost a fight. Once, in the library, I was laughing at some right-wing religious tract from 1957 and he asked me "Don't you believe in God?" A couple days later he asked me if I was a "satanic dude". I got along best with the man who had beaten his girlfriend with a sack of oranges. She was a classmate of mine.

And oh, yes, the kid who said that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and that Tupaq was his role model. White, of course, from Ogalala. He had stolen six cars in six days, once because he was too drunk to walk home from a party. He had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend, he had been allowed to bring her picture inside and we agreed that she was pretty. He would free-style rap after lights-out, terrible beyond all description.

The guy who was there for his sixth DUI, he got a good lawyer and got the same sentence that I did. My cousin's friend Ronnie, there for stealing pork chops and worried that his previous stint in prison would hurt him in front of the judge. He was jubilent when he got 24 days. He liked to talk about the fantisies of killing his father that he had when he was a kid.

There were too many fights over what to watch on TV, so it was taken out sometime before I got there. We walked laps around the meal table, talked, drew, read, played cards. Pitch was far and away the most popular game. I hate pitch. I've always hated pitch.

Church services were held in the rec room at about one P.M on Sundays. I went of course, the only time I've been to church since graduating high school. The rec room was much better lit, the air much cleaner, than in the cell. They brought in a minister and a guitarist from New Life Christian Fellowship, a new-style Evangelical church that can be found on Jeffers a half-mile off the interstate. It is owned by the Catletts, who also own both of the Runzas' that I used to work at and also head the county branch of the GOP.

I was a bit incredulous. With myself and all of my Latino cellmates, there was no question that Catholics outnumbered Protestants at the jail. The minister challenged all of us to "bring Jesus into your heart." Now it was a civil-rights matter. Salvation by grace is not a universal Christian doctrine. He looked a healthy thirty, clearly afraid of us.

The guitarist was a man named Kenny, long curly red hair. I had worked for him at the American Legion when I was sixteen and he was fronting a decent bar band called fear of flying. We helped each other find pot when we needed it. They did an extended jam version of "American Girl" that was just great.

He walked up to me, asked if I remembered him, shook my hand, and asked how things had been. He introduced his version of "I Can Only Imagine" with the line "You know... Jesus is coming real soon man, wow, just to think about being saved is, wow."

There was an outdoor exercise yard, and the weather was nice, but we never went out there. The Sheriff's department can't aford the security to guard inmates out of doors. The basketball hoop rusts.

The North Platte jail is, in fact, quite obsolete. Violent felons share a cell with weekend fuck-ups, sanitation is literally shitty. When inmates our taken to court, they are marched in broad daylight accross the main street to the courthouse. Even our most infamous criminals, like Charles Simants or the boyfriend and girlfriend who killed her mother last week, get this treatment. Major cases require shutting down Jeffers street and putting snipers on the roof to guard against vigilantes.

There's been talk of building a modern jail, with a more secure connection to the courthouse, for as long as I've been alive. Of course it would cost, and it would have the incidental effect of making criminals more comfortable, so nothing has come out of it. I'm sure they'll get around to it once the riot or the TB epidemic comes.

Sheets were changed every two or three days. Standard etiquitte called for restricting masturbation to the shower. I managed to hold off for five days. There was a suicide at the jail, locally famous, that had happened there about three years before my sentence. He hung himself with his jumpsuit in the shower. We thought it was in our shower, but it turns out that the jail was overcrowded at the time and he was being kept in a storage room, where he did the deed.

Biscuits and gravy with orange juice was a common breakfast. The biscuit was unfailingly cold and stale, the orange juice was warm. Don't even ask about the bologna and mayonaise they served with lunch.

"Passion of The Christ" had brought all of the boys to tears except me. "Are you a satanic dude?" Sometime in midweek, Albert (the orange-sack man) was reading an article on the movie and asked me "Josh, what's a pro-test-tent?"

After being released on Saturday night, I went home, showered, dressed went to La Casita's Mexican restaurant, and then to the bar.