Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [60]
Jack lived in the Balboa County jail for 66 days, awaiting trial. It was not his first county jail. The jail was on the top floor of the courthouse building and took up the whole left side of the floor. There was a long corridor with a concrete wall on one side and bars on the other, and in the corridor was a desk, manned by a county deputy during the day and unmanned at night. At the left end of the corridor was a concrete-reinforced steel door, and to one side of it was a steel judas window six inches square. Outside this door was another short corridor which ended in a barred gate, and beyond that the elevator foyer and the doors leading to the visitor’s room, the lawyer’s consulting rooms and the women’s and juvenile divisions of the county jail. When the prisoners were being taken to the visitor’s room or to see their lawyer, they were led past the elevators, but that was all right, because the elevator doors were enclosed in a tiny barred cell of their own; persons emerging from the elevators found themselves in a small cell that could be opened only by the man sitting at a desk just out of long hand-reach from the cell. There was a deputy at this desk day and night.
The felony tank itself was behind the bars that made up one side of the long corridor. It was an open room, surrounded on three sides by cells that were never locked except for special prisoners. The men slept in the cells and spent their days in the big bullpen, where there were some tables and chairs and a couple of long benches. No matter where the prisoners were, in the cells or out in the bullpen, the deputy sitting at the desk in the corridor could see them, and if there was any trouble, a riot or anything of the sort, the deputy could quell it by using the fire hose curled against the wall beside the desk. There was no place in the tank the deputy could not reach with his fire hose. The lights in the tank were controlled from the desk, but there was one, in the ceiling of the bullpen, that never went out. At nine o’clock a deputy came in from the elevator foyer and flipped the switch, extinguishing the lights in the corridor and two of the lights in the tank, but the one in the middle always stayed on. All the light bulbs in the tank were covered with heavy wire cages, but the one in the middle had been worked loose, and after the deputy left the men often climbed up on a table and unscrewed the bulb so they could sleep in the dark. The place smelled of damp concrete, creosote, and sweat.
When a prisoner or suspect first arrived he was wearing the clothes he was arrested in, minus any belts, suspenders, neckties, or shoelaces with which he could hang himself in a fit of depression. If the prisoner or suspect was indicted by the grand jury, held over, or convicted by the municipal or superior courts, his personal clothing was taken from him and he was issued a light blue work shirt and darker blue dungarees. Every Friday these were exchanged for clean ones, and the dirty ones sent to a Laundromat owned by one of the deputies. This cleaning cost was deducted from the prisoner’s pay or from his fund of money down in the property room, and was one dollar per cleaning.
The prisoners were divided into three groups. The first group consisted of trusties, who did not live in the felony tank but at a farm outside the city limits, where they slept in barracks and grew some of the food consumed by the other prisoners and by persons in the county hospital. In order to be a trusty you had to have been convicted of a misdemeanor and doing more than thirty days’ time, and to exhibit a spirit of willingness to reform. The trusties were mostly farmworkers who had been caught drunk driving or gambling; some of them were just ordinary citizens who had been found guilty of one thing or another and could not get probation. Several were in for failure to provide child support.
The second class of prisoners included those who were not admitted to trusty status but who had money downstairs in the property