I drove up to Jackson Correctional Institution yesterday to see a client. Although the officer by the metal detector was concerned, the buttons on my dress were plastic and I remembered not to wear an underwire bra. As we transacted our business, the front desk officer commented that I was very chatty and I was. I�m always chatty in the prisons. It�s called whistling in the dark.

I�ve visited many prisons, both largely unknown (Oakhill Correctional Institution) and infamous (Sing-Sing). Even the minimum security places cause me to whistle in the dark. The sense of evil that frightens me does not come from the inmates. The inmates are more ordinary than most people would expect. I�ve only met two who exuded evil. Most simply exude poor impulse control, stupidity, and short-sightedness. All of that can be dangerous but it�s too everyday to shake my core.

What generates my fear is the way the prison reinforces at every turn that I am not in control and that someone I can�t even see might be. It�s the design of the place from the metal detector that dictates what bra I wear to the hand stamp that sometimes causes a rash to the clank of the automatic sliding doors. It�s observing some guards exercise power arbitrarily just because they can. One front desk officer at Racine Correctional tried to turn me away because the Hispanic records clerk had mistyped my first name so the name on the paperwork did not perfectly match the name on my driver�s license. The only thing that thwarted him was that his sergeant came by then and the sergeant was someone I had chatted with on my previous visit.

People who think that prisons are country clubs miss this point. (Actually, given our overcrowded prisons, they miss a lot of points because I still know inmates who are sleeping on mattresses on the floor and I know several who received medical care so bad they would have been better off with none at all. None of them would believe they were at a country club. No country club stays in existence with service that bad.) Interestingly, they miss it although many of them are the first to chafe when encountering strict rules.

Perhaps I�m not whistling in the dark at all. The more I think about it, the more all that chat feels like appeasing the gods�the prison gods.

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