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Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail
"I watched a deputy turn the pages of a Heckler and Koch firearms catalog and converse with his comrade about a personal weapons purchase. The jail complex is a labyrinthine warren of passegeways and stairs and locked rooms."
( Also Read: Prison Camp - York County, South Carolina )
RECOMMENDATION: SURVIVE A JAIL OR PRISON SENTENCE. THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SURVIVING A CRIMINAL TRIAL AND JAIL OR PRISON SENTENCE.. I highly recommend this 75 page E-Book written by an experienced urban criminal defense attorney. Packed with valuable wisdom that answers your questions and could make a big difference to your case. - STEVE.
You bend over and spread your cheeks and the cop checks your anus for contraband. You are all standing around the stainless steel table naked. Your filthy blue pajamas wadded in a bundle with a big plastic zip-lock bag holding your personal papers and few inmate snacks, cup o' noodles and candy bars.
The full spectrum of body types from the street emerge, rib cages showing, emaciated bodies of the homeless, the muscular marked tattooed gang bodies of the homies and the aerodynamic gorilla anatomies of the street Africans. The young shaved-head white sheriff deputies yell at you to squat down "like you are taking a shit in the woods" and lift up your balls. You stand back up facing the putty colored cinderblock wall, lift one foot at a time and wiggle your toes while a trustee takes your dirty clothing and throws a new bundle of pajamas and towel on the cold cement floor next to your feet.
The deputies walk around the table wearing rubber latex gloves and rifle through your papers removing whatever appears to be extraneous. You dress and are told to follow the red line through the long flourescent cinder block corridor to the 700 dorms and sit in a glass holding tank with strange slits of natural sunlight entering from the ceiling. It looks like a shopping mall with the central information kiosk looking into each of the dorms arranged in a semicircle; one deputy looking into three dorms simultaneously. The deputies use a key and turn it to the left and a motor slides the heavy reinforced glass and metal door open. You walk into the dorm with your green sleeping pad covered in vinyl and sweat and body fluid and base human existence.
The dorms look like storefronts in a mall after closing. The metal security gates seal the front of each unit. You can see the merchandise in the store. You could even reach it if your arms were long enough. The front of the dorms presents the strange sense of being open to the outside but closed forever with tall thick steel girders, in the shape of a diamond, rising vertically to the second floor ceiling.
Under bright always-on fluorescent lightws in the urinal, sink, shower area of the 9400 dorm in Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, the dorm is on the fourth floor. Long empty hallways with shiny polished floor tiles and concrete connect the cell blocks. Throughout the years inmates, trustees, tattoo-arbursh-artist-prisoners, were tasked to paint colorful murals on the walls.
Along the cinderblock walls of the primary ground floor passage is a massive western cowboy and indian motif mural painted in the early 1970's by the looks of the style and age of the paint. Prisoner transfers occur at all hours of the day and night. It is incredibly surreal to awaken from the green vinyl sleeping mat at an unknown hour and move out of the holding tank and into the main hallway down the nonfunctioning escalator and into an identical cell two floors below.
Painted on the wall, at the end of the passageway, near the entrance door to the 9400 dorm is a giant caricature of John Wayne wearing a blue cavalry shirt and a yellow bandana around his neck. He is portrayed as a cavalry officer from one of his famous western movies. These types of paintings are throughout the inside of the building.
Seeing these pictorials reminds one of the inside of an Army barracks with murals of tanks and cobra helicopters. Only in this case, inside the jail, the tanks and helicopters are portrayed and marked as LA County Sheriff equipment; cartoon caricatures of buff, military sheriff deputies larger than life on the walls.
Underneath one mural a black man naked for an infraction was handcuffed to a smooth shiny stainless steel bench. Three hundred inmates lined up in the passageway going into eat a meal and this young black man just sitting there naked looking down.
Weathered, gruff, hostile, hard graying middle-aged sheriff deputies stand with the young white less experienced deputies in a group and are overheard telling each other pornographic jokes. I watched and heard as a deputy turned the pages of a Heckler and Koch firearms catalog and conversed with his comrade about a personal weapons purchase. The jail complex is a labyrinthine warren of passageways and stairs and locked rooms.
Mexicans shave each others heads near the urinals and sinks. They use the one-blade orange plastic disposable razor handed out with the fish kits. A Latino Warrior kneels and another lathers up his short head hair stubble and begins to simply shave the head bald. The cheap blades of the orange plastic razor cut and nick the skin of the scalp.
Blood trails run downward from the scalp, along the neck and torso and are absorbed into the blue stretch waistband of the prison pajama pants. Millions of bits of black Aztec hair are imbedded on the neck, shoulder and torso. Millions more cover the white tiles of the wide latrine floor and are mixed with smeared blood, dead skin, dirt, and grime. Mexican semen and pubic hair produce the final product of gritty, dark bio-hazard sludge.
These Mexican, Hispanic, Latino, gang members shave each other nonstop from after breakfast until far into the night. When you sit to have a bowel movement on the open non-private row of stainless steel toilets embedded into the cement and cinder blocks you have no choice but to watch this scene unfold before you.
Unflushed excrement and toilet paper clog the flushing system. The stench of this calamity is the trademark of the prison experience. Mexicans shaving Mexicans with their bloody heads draining onto the floor next to the shower.
A three-inch layer of used water fills the recessed tiled ten by fifteen foot shower area. Foamy sludge and brownish white djecta flotsam matter sit on the top of the water. The drains are clogged by soap, hair, toilet paper and saturated pieces of low quality baloney, bread, semen and sandwich wrappers.
As the person showering moves, this matter is mixed and submerged into the water - reagitated, reinvigorated.
RECOMMENDATIONS: SURVIVE A JAIL OR PRISON SENTENCE. THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SURVIVING A CRIMINAL TRIAL AND JAIL OR PRISON SENTENCE.. I highly recommend this 75 page E-Book written by an experienced urban criminal defense attorney. Packed with valuable wisdom that answers your questions and could make a big difference to your case. - STEVE.
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