There's a town in north central Missouri (Cameron) in which there is a very strange sight: two brand-new prisons, sitting side-by-side. Over the past ten years or so, the prison industry has enjoyed a boom, based on the crime-prevention-lock-'em-up hysteria that U.S. culture has succumbed to. We have had the "war on drugs" (remember that? it was just before the "war on terror"), and the "three strikes" stuff, and the "life-without-parole" and "mandatory minimums" stuff. It's been tremendously exhilarating for state legislatures, and for contractors. And the result is that lots of prisons have been built in little towns, throughout rural Missouri, and they all look alike. In Cameron, MO, there are two sitting right next to each other. One has blue metal roofs, the other one has green metal roofs. Weird.
I've been to the Cameron prisons, several times... today I went to the green-roof one, to see a guy. He was wearing a new kind of headgear, known as the "spit mask." Guys who are known to spit on correction officers (also known as "CO's," or guards) now are not only put in "the hole" (where they have virtually no human contact, and see no daylight, ever), but when they are taken out, they are shackled, handcuffed, wrists chained to their waists, and they have to wear this thing. It goes around the guy's entire head. The bottom half is a flexible white shield, going up to the bottom of his nostrils; the upper half is mesh, like a mosquito net, and it's all gathered together at the top of the head into a little knot. It is hard to describe. You can't see the guy's mouth, at all (so it is more difficult to understand his speech). I actually began drawing it, while I was talking to the prisoner today, and he noticed what I was doing. He looked over at my legal pad, and said: "You're drawing! You're doodling!". I was reluctant to tell him that I was making a sketch of what he looked like in the spit mask, so that I could describe it in words, later, if I had to write a report. I didn't want him to feel that he was a spectacle. I told him that I was, in fact, just "doodling," to keep my fountain pen from getting dry. And then I engaged in some convincing doodling, to prove my point...
Shocking and upsetting, all the more so because you didn't say it was shocking or upsetting, just took us there with you.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was both of those, Jean. I needed to call on all my skills in maintaining a pleasantly neutral facial expression, when I first saw this guy. I had never even heard of this "spit mask" device, before...
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