Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Next Time You Do Something I Don't Like, Maybe I'll Try Flinging Poop At You

One inmate attacked another with a homemade knife, or "prong" if you're into prison lingo, last week. They were taken to the hole and everyone else was put on lock down for somewhere between two and four days. Denis gets vague about the passage of time when it starts to come in 24-hour chunks of enforced inactivity, which upsets the obsessive side of my nature, but I guess it's a coping mechanism. Either that or he's killed too many of the little grey cells.

Incidentally, I'm glad that I finally had a chance to refer to "the hole." I've been sort of hoping that I'd get to say it, with authority.

Anyway, no one was happy about the lock down, and a few of them protested by saving up their poops and then throwing them into the hall in a concerted effort. One enterprising man stuffed his toilet full of newspaper, crapped in it, and then flushed until the whole mess overflowed into the hall. The point of it was that the guards have to clean it up, although Denis said that they didn't exactly hop to it (surprising, no?).

The thing that gets me about this story is that the inmates clearly engaged in a fairly evolved degree of political cooperation in that they agreed on a course of action designed to express their unhappiness with the status quo and presumably, to change things for the better. That's some of the best of human reasoning right there. And they used it to fling poop. It pleases my sense of irony, is all.

It's a gross story, but I admit to a certain amount of amusement imagining clean freak Denis coping with a stagnant pool of raw sewage on the floor. I'll bet that he regretted giving up the top bunk that day.

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