PRISON BLOG 5

EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE

With the inmates doing their best not to line up properly on the two yellow lines – that the lines are only long enough for half the people a convenient excuse – the tension builds. The entire muster is on parade outside “control”, that is to say the watchhouse. It must be a talking from on high.

Out comes the management guy who had completed a brisk inspection lap of the compound during lock-down. The same guy in civvy clothes who had then helped turn-over a cell. He was wearing a Queensland meets Napier combo that might pass for Hawkes Bay chic; but with his sunglasses propped atop his boofy hair, white trousers and boat shoes it was a look that died in the early ‘90s where I come from.

He has the demeanor of a “Honky Boss Man” – the same mix of fear, frustration and anger of an over-reached provincial yuppy desperately trying to sell his BMW to pay irrate creditors just after the ’87 crash. His manner is somewhere between an ungracious maths teacher and a disappointed car-yard owner chastising his salesmen.

His address to inmates is coarse, tetchy and entirely negative. No positives at all: no “thank you for not stabbing each other for the last six months,” no “thanks for not threatening to murder the staff” – nothing, just criticism. There were cell phones, he could smell dope – and those offenders were about “to have their lives change” dramatically he said ominously, referring to immediate transfers to a higher security unit. (At this last point let me say that smoking God’s herb would be an excellent cure for boredom in this place and an activity I would engage in were it not for the risk of detection (random tests, checks and searches) and the resultant punishments including potentially being made to serve the full sentence.)

Inmates, he explains, will not be getting a barbecue as previously arranged because of misbehaviour. His obsessive pet hate of people trading food (for gambling debts primarily) and his counter-measure of banning all food swapping/leaving in the dining hall is underscored (he is said to watch the closed circuit video from the dining hall with regularity) as are the restrictions of inmates coming to the grille at control for enquires. So far so facist. Throughout this time he fidgets : clenching his keys and coin change with his hands thrust deep in his straining white pants, with his billowing gut hanging out over the top like a giant blob of golden syrup ready to drop, he angrily confirms and reconfirms the list of lost privileges and makes further threats of group punishment. This man is a massive heart attack that can’t come soon enough.

He asks for questions. Why yes, here are some questions for our marooned friend from the ‘80s.

Why is it that many of these rules are only applicable to this unit and not in the others? (The way it was said made it sound as if “the others” included every other prison too.) Alarmingly he doesn’t deny it. You may remember his justification from school days: “because those are the rules…I make the rules….I don’t care what they do in other units…this is my unit…I’ll run it the way I want…” etc etc. – and just as unconvincing. Far from being appreciative of their special, perhaps unique, treatment the inmates mirror in expression the resentful tone of their would-be Col. Klink: Why is the carving room still shut down? What is the point of that room then? Why do we have to throw our food in the bin rather than give it to someone who wants it? Why is the grille only open for two hours a day?

The response each time is that all these measures are for inmate safety – except the last, which is “so staff can get on with their paperwork” without being “annoyed every two minutes.” Well, every other unit seems to survive the hectic disruption to the all important paperwork unscathed. What special challenges do his staff face that they need more hours of imposed boredom and increased amounts of prisoner frustration? Klink only knows.

Later that afternoon I go to the grille to ask if there is any mail for me or for the other two guys who asked if I could check for them since I was up there. The officer had barely left the counter to look when Klink, his eyes bulging, suddenly lurches into view like a manic puppet and starts speaking a mile a minute. Up close he has a ruddy complextion and a glowing red beak of a nose. He warns me to “do your own lag” and that asking for other people’s mail could be a stand-over. Well everything in Klink’s hyperactive, neurotic imagining is a stand-over or potential stand-over I was quickly learning. It also fitted neatly into his efforts to piss prisoners off and reduce the efficiency and service to a level bordering on the Wellingtonian ;) I try to explain that I have no intention of getting the others mail, only to save two people a wasted journey if they had none. But I wasn’t getting a word in edgewise. Paranoia reigns supreme: it could all be a stand-over you see he reiterates without realizing he is the only one doing any standing-over (or am I being too generous?).

His eyes are furiously popping by now, his speech rapid, observations acutely delusional and exhibiting all the signs, the symptoms, of a fried-up P Head at the end of a three-day meth binge. If he was an inmate he would surely be tested. This is a very stressed out Klink. Maybe General Berkholter is due to visit the stalag?

But he isn’t quite wound up enough yet – not enough to take his glasses out of his boofy hair and wave them in one hand and exclaim in exasperation “Hogan!” So I tell him his whole food idea is wrong. He repeats his standard line and I say that while I sympathise that some skinny white guys have dropped unconscious in the past because they have had to pay all their food to someone the opposite of skinny and white – that is why they shouldn’t be in such a unit to start with and that basically his rule shouldn’t be enforced. Alas, he said, he didn’t need advice and he had run prisons for a long time. Well for a unit with more cell phones than an Auckland high school and more cannibas than a Northland one (some listening to him on parade were probably stoned – I wish I could have been one of them) and a peculiar regime of limiting even standard services, privileges and rights alike, one has to wonder how successful he is and how long he will be with us – heart attack or not.

Now the stressbunny’s attitude is in stark contrast to the largely good-natured staff it must be emphasised – despite reports from some of the longer-serving inmates that have noticed good staff become more distant and less friendly under his tenure. Without their professional discretion and practical flexibility his regime would be as bad as he makes it sound – and no doubt intends it to be.

The problem is that management does set an example. Under this regime (as with schools) the official rule book, the manual, is nothing but a door stop – all the procedures and fine words and commitments to fairness etc. are absolutely redundant in practice. The rules are arbitrary, unilateral and set and re-set by Col. Klink on P. It puts the inmates as well as the staff in an awkward position. If it is difficult for inmates how bad is it for the staff?

And hanging over every prisoner is the absolute impotence they have to do anything about it. They can be in the pound or transferred immediately at a whim without a credible or verifiable reason and without chance of appeal. “Troublemakers” could find themselves in very hostile territory in a prison like this – within a matter of hours.

Tim Selwyn
Prison Blogger