Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [61]
The third class of prisoners had neither trusty status nor money. They had to do all the work in the tank and were paid a dollar a day for their efforts. This money was placed in their accounts each Friday, minus one dollar for cleaning. These men made the beds, cleaned out the cells, mopped down, washed the walls, disinfected, carried out the graniteware pails that were used for toilets, and acted as intermediaries between the tank and the outside.
The prisoners in the tank were fed three times a day and exercised twice a day. In the morning, after lights-on at six-thirty, the working prisoners cleaned up, took out the slop pails, and then brought in a big aluminum kettle full of black coffee and two trays of mugs; and, following this, brought in two trays of bowls and spoons and a kettle of oatmeal mush. Some of this breakfast was actually eaten by prisoners who had no money, always with expressions of rage and disgust, because the unsweetened coffee always tasted like chlorine, and the oatmeal, without sweetening and only thinly mixed with powdered milk, tasted like nothing at all.
The prisoners who had money, working through an established route of intermediaries, ate whatever they wanted, having it sent up from the restaurant in the basement. The cost of these meals was twenty-five cents above the listed price, and the extra money went to the deputy who carried up the food. Other articles could be had from the deputies: books, magazines, newspapers, etc., for which the carrying charge was also twenty-five cents above purchase price, except for cigarettes, which were a set thirty-five cents a pack. The prisoners were not allowed to have cartons of cigarettes.
The noon meal for the prisoners without money was the big meal of the day, and was usually a bowl of vegetable stew with meat flavoring, or macaroni and cheese, tea, and two slices of bread. For dessert, there were prunes. The evening meal was bread and jam and tea. Everybody, even the prisoners with money, ate the bread and jam, because the jam was made and sold to the county by the wife of one of the deputies, and was considered excellent. Even the deputies on duty would have some.
For exercise, at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon, all the prisoners lined up two or three deep in the middle of the bullpen, the tables and chairs all pushed aside to make room, and did calisthenics under the personal direction of the sheriff of the county, who stood in the corridor and did all the exercises himself, bellowing out the count in his deep manly voice. He was a very popular sheriff, and was justly famous for his belief that county prisoners were more than a mere administrative and economic problem, that they were men, too, and needed to keep their strength up if they were to lead useful lives on the outside. When, due to the pressures of outside business, the sheriff could not make it for the exercise periods, a deputy would read the exercises from a mimeographed sheet in a bored voice, sitting at the desk in the corridor. Each exercise period lasted fifteen minutes, and no one was excused except violent prisoners, who were locked in their cells. Even the prisoners with money had to exercise.
Jack Levitt was brought in on a Thursday, late, and all the other prisoners seemed to know he was being held on a capital crime, and they let him alone. The deputy led Jack to an empty cell and Jack got onto the bunk and fell asleep in only a few minutes. The next day he was taken right out to wait for his interview with District Attorney Forbes, and that night, after he was brought back, he was taken with the others down the corridor to the shower room; but he was not yet given a set of dungarees. After his shower he was conscious of the musty odor of his clothes, and it bothered him a little. Nobody talked to him except to tell him where to go and what to do. None of the prisoners spoke