Over the Edge (11 page)

When the opaque door opened, I was looking at a young Hispanic man in civilian clothes - pale blue shirt and blue-green tartan tie under a sleeveless maroon V-neck sweater, grey corduroy slacks, crepe-soled buckskin oxfords. A picture ID card clipped to the collar of the shirt said he was a social worker. He was tall, narrow, and long-limbed. Glossy brush-cut hair capped a long, pale face. Large, elfin ears created a striking resemblance to Mr. Spock that didn't dissipate when he spoke: His voice was flat, as emotionless as Morse code.

'Dr. Delaware, I'm Patrick Montez. I'm supposed to orient you. Please come with me.'

On the other side of the door was a wide, empty yellow corridor. As we entered it, one of the deputies in the glass booth stuck his head out and scanned the hallway in both directions. Montez took me to an elevator. We rose several flights and exited into more glossy yellow, trimmed with blue. I caught a glimpse of rumpled hospital beds through an open door at the end of the corridor.

'My office is over there,' he said, pointing across the hall.

A slatted wooden bench ran the length of the wall outside the office. Two men in yellow pyjamas sat slumped at opposite ends. The nearer one was a squat dark Mexican in his sixties with rummy eyes and a fallen face. The other was a young man with a full head of surfer-blond curls -tan, muscular and scarcely out of his teens. His face was male-model perfect except for the
 
tics that caused his

features to jump like Galvani's frog. As we passed, the wino looked away. But the blond boy turned toward us. Something feral slithered into his eyes, and his mouth twitched into a snarl.

Suddenly he strained to rise. I looked quickly at Montez, but he seemed unperturbed. The blond boy grunted and raised his buttocks an inch from the bench before snapping back sharply, as if forced down rudely by an invisible hand. Then I saw the shackles around his wrists - metal cuffs chained to stationary bolts running through the bench seat.

A deputy appeared, nightstick in hand. The blond boy cried out gutturally. The deputy stood watch from a distance as the prisoner slammed his back several times against the slats, then sank back down, breathing hard and mouthing silent obscenities.

'Come on in, Doctor,' said Montez, as if nothing had happened. He took out a ring of keys, unlocked the door, and held it open.

The interior of the office was standard county issue: desk chairs and table of grey-painted metal; a corkboard pinned with layers of official documents. The room was window-less and ventilated by a ceiling fan. A table beside the desk held a thriving potted devil's ivy and a police scanner that hissed and spat until the social worker leaned over and turned it off.

'This is the largest jail system in the world,' he said. 'Official maximum capacity is fifty-one hundred inmates. Right now we've got seventy-three hundred. On a good weekend, when the city really gets down to partying, we process sixteen thousand.'

He reached into a drawer and pulled out a roll of Life Savers.

'Want one?'

'No thanks.'

He popped a candy into his mouth and sucked on it.

'You're a psychologist?'

'Right.'

'In theory there are two parallel systems here: mental health and custody. We're supposed to work together. In

actuality mental health is a guest. The jail is run by the sheriff's department, and the main emphasis is on processing and maintaining criminals. Psychiatric input is viewed as another tool to make that work.'

'Makes sense,' I said.

He nodded.

'I start out with that spiel because I always get questions from mental health people about our treatment philosophy, modes of therapy - all that good stuff. The truth of it is this is a giant corral: We lock them up and work at keeping them alive and reasonably healthy until trial. Even if we had time for psychotherapy, I doubt it would help most of our guys. About fifteen percent are seriously psychiatrically disturbed - more impaired than the patients at County Hospital. Bona fide psychotics who're also murderers, rapists, armed robbers. If you include your everyday ambulatory sociopath - guys judged to be too dangerous to be released on bail - triple that figure. On top of that are the derelicts and gomers who do something especially outrageous and can't make ten percent of a seventy-five-dollar bail. Most of them are head cases, too.'

'Do you medicate them?'

'If the inmate has a private psychiatrist who's willing to administer and monitor dosages - like Cadmus - he gets medicated. Otherwise no. We're not staffed for it - one part-time psychiatrist who comes in once in a while and a handful of nurses for the entire jail. The deputies aren't qualified to handle it.'

I considered the notion of a thousand or so mentally disturbed felons cooped up without treatment and asked how long the average stay was.

'Usually it's days, not weeks. Again, it's a matter of processing; we have to move out as many as we move in or there'd be no place to put 'em. As is, we've got inmates sleeping on the roof in the summer and in the aisles when it cools down. Once in a while you come across someone who should have been released a month ago but wasn't because the paper work got lost and his lawyer was incompetent. Plenty of attorneys do a lot of screaming and filing of writs,

but they don't understand the system and end up causing more trouble for their clients.'

'Plenty but not all,' I said.

He smiled and clicked the Life Saver against his teeth.

'Two hours ago an order came down from on high to give you the grand tour. Now here we are. That should tell you something about Mr. Souza's influence.'

'I appreciate your spending the time.'

'No problem. Gives me a little respite from paper work.'

He chewed the candy and swallowed it, took another from the roll. The ensuing silence was punctuated by a loud scream, followed by several more. Several hard thumps vibrated the wall behind us - the slatted bench being pushed repeatedly against the plaster. More screams, a blizzard of running footsteps, the whisper of a scuffle, and all was calm. Montez had sat through it without moving a muscle.

'Back to lockup for Mark,' he said.

'The blond kid?'

'Yup. Comes up for trial next week. Seemed to be calming down. You never know.'

'What did he do?'

'Ate a lot of PCP and tried to decapitate his girlfriend.'

'A guy like that doesn't get locked in a cell?'

'He came in too disturbed and too pretty to be put on cellblock, too healthy for the infirmary. We have a thirty-five-room inpatient unit - isolation rooms for prisoners too iffy for general custody - and we stuck him there, but when he started to get lucid, we moved him out to make room for someone crazier and put him on the ward. Ward patients get to move around under supervision. He started to look a little "spacey this morning, so they cuffed him. Obviously he's' slipping again - pretty typical for a duster. He belongs back in isolation, but we've got no vacancies, so he'll have to go to a cellblock with twenty-four-hour lockup. If an empty room comes up, he'll be moved back here.'

'Sounds like juggling,' I said.

'With live grenades. But don't take that to mean it's a shlocky system. The public wants bad guys caught and put

away, but no one wants to pay for a place to put 'em. Considering the situation, this is probably the best-run system in the country. You've got enough violent offenders to populate a small city, and despite that, things go smoothly. Take initial processing, for example. When a guy comes in, we've got to find out if he's a member of a street gang or a prison gang to know where to put him. Some gangs coexist; others will rip each other apart on sight. Until recently we didn't even have a computer, but screwups were rare. If they weren't, there'd be blood in the halls, and last I checked, things still looked pretty yellow.'

'And blue.' I smiled.

'Right. School colours. Probably some urban planner's idea of what soothes the savage breast.' The phone rang. He picked it up, talked about moving Cochran from 7100 to 4500, made inquiries about a leg abscess on Lopez and Boutillier's need for twenty-four-hour nursing, put the receiver down, and stood up.

'If you're ready, we can check out the campus. Then I'll take you to see your client.'

He took me to the inpatient unit first - thirty-five isolation rooms set aside for inmates with profound psychiatric problems. Five were marked COED and had been set aside for women, but men occupied three of them. Visual access was provided through a mesh window in the door of each room. A scrap of paper identifying the prisoner was taped below the window. Some of the papers bore coded messages as well.

The codes, explained Montez, referred to inmate characteristics that demanded staff vigilance: suicidal tendencies, drug addiction, unpredictability, mental retardation, assaultiveness, medical abnormalities, and physical handicaps - as in the case of die toothless double amputee in the first room I viewed, who stood on his knee stumps and stared at the floor. The code said he was unusually explosive.

The social worker encouraged me to look at the prisoners, and I did, despite some unease at being intrusive. The rooms were tiny - six-by-four. Each one contained a bed and a steel commode and nothing else. Most of the inmates lay on the beds wrapped in jumbled sheets. A few slept; others stared desolately into space. In one of the coed rooms I saw a black woman squatting on the commode. Before I could look away, our eyes met, and she grinned defiantly, spread her legs, stretched, and stroked her labia while licking her lips. A glance into another cell revealed a three-hundred-pound white man festooned with tattoos standing catatonically rigid, hands held over his head, eyes glazed over. Next door to him, a coal-coloured youth with sculpted musculature and a shaved bullet head paced and worked his mouth nonstop. Soundproofing silenced the message, but I read his lips: Fuckyoufuckmefuckyoufuckme, over and over, like a catechism.

When I told him I'd seen enough, Montez took me off the unit and back to the elevator. While we waited, I asked him why Jamey wasn't in one of the inpatient rooms.

'He's been judged too dangerous. They put him on the High Power unit, which I'll explain later.'

The elevator came, and we boarded. Montez punched a number and rode slouching against the door.

'What do you think so far?' he asked.

'Strong stuff.'

'What you just saw was the Hilton. Every lawyer wants his client in one of those rooms, and inmates are always faking craziness to get there because it's safe - no one gets cut or raped - which isn't the case on cellblock.'

'Seven thousand applicants for thirty-five spaces,' I reflected. 'A seller's market.'

'You bet. More exclusive than Harvard.'

As we neared the hub of the jail, the silence that had characterised the isolation unit was replaced by a low, insectile hum. Montez had used the word campus, and strangely enough, the academic analogy seemed superficially fitting - wide, bright corridors teeming with young people and bustling with activity, the energy level reminiscent of a university during registration week.

But the walls of this college were grungy and permeated with a stale, masculine stench, and there was nothing bright-eyed about its students. We walked past scores of stone-faced men, enduring a gauntlet of cold, radar stares.

The prisoners walked freely, and we were in their midst, unprotected.

They stood around singly or in small groups, wearing royal blue jump suits. Some walked purposefully, clutching sheafs of paper. Others slumped listlessly in plastic chairs or waited in line for cigarettes and candy. From time to time a uniformed deputy could be seen strolling and surveilling, but the inmates vastly outnumbered the guards, and I could see nothing to prevent the confined from overpowering their keepers and tearing them - and us - to shreds.

Montez saw the look on my face and nodded.

'I told you it was a hell of a system. Held together by prayer and spit.'

We walked on. It was a young man's world. Most of the inmates were under twenty-five. The guards looked scarcely older. A profusion of bulky shoulders and bulging biceps. I knew what that meant: plenty of hard time. Pumping iron was a favourite prison yard pastime.

The prisoners clustered along racial lines. The majority were black. I saw lots of Rasta dreadlocks, cornrows, and shaved skulls, a plethora of shiny, keloid knife scars on dusky flesh. Second largest in number were the Latinos -smaller but just as husky, sporting bandanna-bound homeboy pompadours, devilish goatees, and vato loco swaggers. Whites were in the minority. For the most part they were biker types - hulking, bearded lugs with hog jowls, earrings, and greasy forearms blued with Iron Cross tattoos.

Despite their differences they had one thing in common: the eyes. Cold and dead, immobile yet piercing. I'd seen eyes like that recently but couldn't quite remember where.

Montez took me to a general population cellblock where most of the cells were empty - we'd just seen their occupants - and then to a twenty-four-hour lockup full of wild.

gaunt men in yellow pyjamas who tore at their faces and paced like zoo animals. A single deputy watched balefully from a glass rectangle suspended midway between the two tiers of the block. He saw us and unlocked the door.

Stepping into the booth, I felt like a diver in a shark cage. Soul music blasted the block from multiple speakers. Even in the booth it was loud. I thought of a recent article in a psych journal about the effects of constant high-volume noise on rats: The rodents had grown initially agitated, then had withdrawn into a passive psychotic-like state. I looked at the pacing men in yellow and wondered for the thousandth time about the relevance of animal research to the human condition.

A console of electronic equipment lined one wall. Above it was a rack holding two shotguns. Below, an inmate in a khaki jump suit pushed a mop over the soapy cement floor.

'Trustee?' I asked.

'Right. Everything's colour-coded. Blue is mainline; khaki means trustee; transport trustees have red armbands; kitchen trustees wear white. These guys in yellow are psych cases. They never leave their cells.'