GEO LAWTON: THE SICKEST PRISON

This is where the politicians hide their border-hopper problem. The 20 million Mexicans that the gov/media alliance calls only 12 million Mexicans leave their dregs here. With them they bring their tropical diseases, particularly their respiratory diseases: the ones that take your breath away, such as corona viruses, rhinoviruses, respiratory syncital viruses, pneumonia viruses, bacillus pneumonia and hundreds more. For the most part, they are a deliberately rude, obnoxious, extremely ignorant, yet very cunning/conniving, dirty people who do not believe in germs. They think the American southwest belongs to them, and they are determined to take it back. I'm speaking of these Mexican dreg prisoners, not the Mexicans who work for a living.

The first thing they did after dragging me here as punishment for not mopping a small space often enough was stuff me in a cage with one of these ignorant, obnoxious Mexicans from Oklahoma City. This one, whose name is, appropriately, "Mesick", which illustrates his state of mental health. One of the first things that he told me was that his vocation is thief. This came up in conversation as he was explaining to me his aversion to light. (Almost every prisoner hates light, for several reasons, but they usually just explain it as "They (the guards) can see us, Homie:" Several of the more detailed reasons that are never stated are that the light interferes with their sleep; (which amounts to 9 to 14 hours/day); they jealously want to interfere with other captives' reading; it interferes with their TV watching; the "minority" inmates are always slowly walking by with their heads cocked into each cage they pass, eyes searching and prying, as if window shopping at the quik trip, looking for, mostly, anything that they can need to borrow, or steal. Their last concern is that the guards would bother to look at them. (Fact is, the guards could not care less what inmates do while locked up inside cages inside more locked cages.) Mesick, who hides behind the prison alias "Caspar" (this cartoon ghost is a very popular figure among prisoners), is proud to tell me that he can see in the dark; that he has to be good at seeing in the dark because he is a "professional" burglar. He's such a good burglar, in fact, that he is 40 years old and finally got 35 years from repeating his favorite crime of pilfering through workingman's possessions in the dark while they are gone or asleep.

Mesick is, oddly, a rare germophobe, and he proves it with his obsession of sweeping and mopping the floor. Every morning, at the crack of 11AM, the last second before the kops lock everybody up tightest for count, Mesick is on his mission to find a broom, clean mophead and bleach. Through mere annoyance and obnoxious, loud, continuous begging, he usually obtains these things from the kops. why they give in to his daily scheme is a mystery, but he often even gets to keep his door unlocked during this count in order to clean his cage, which is the point, other than sheer laziness, to waiting til the last second before count, to demand service.

Though his floor is clean, Mesick undoes himself and the unfortunate forced to suffer him in that cage. Like all inmates, he is obsessed by little drops of urine that fall on the lidless toilet. These, they think, must be wiped up immediately, each time a man whizzes, despite the extreme, artificial shortage of toilet paper caused by penny-pinching prisoncrats. These inmates, while very young children, must have been bitch-slapped all over their ghettos by their Moms, Aunties and grandmothers, to have been so deeply imprinted about the necessity of wiping their urine off toilets. their obsession is "piss on it, then stick your hand in it to wipe it up". Handwashing afterward is usually not done, though they often pretend that they do and insist that others should do so "too".

Mesick is ahead of the game, here. Because his heroin, crack-cocaine and marijuana addictions demand his constant attention, he saves toilet paper by using newspaper to indulge his piss-wiping obsession. This eventually clogs the toilets downstream of his and costs others much inconvenience, but he is able to sell the toilet paper thus saved to service his dope addictions. Every little bit of pocket change adds up for a cheap prison "hustler" and connive-artist who always has his eyes cocked for the smallest opportunity.

Mesick is behind the learning curve on his obsession with water on the tiny sinks that sit just above the toilets. They have buttons that must be pushed to deliver a one-inch-high column of water to drink from. This dribble is not sufficient for a highly technological people to call adequate to drink from or wash hands in, yet every time I try to have the "plumber" turn the screw to raise the stream to, say, three inches high, I've met massive resistance from the inmate plumber and his supervisor, and the inmates who would benefit from a fountain in place of an unsanitary dribble to drink from and wash in. The plumbers invariably vend the lie that "changing the pressure in yours will change the pressure in everyone else's sink." The inmates, all of them ignorant young minorities who spent more time in pool halls and malls than in school, have no excuse for keeping a dribble, so they tend to go for the plumber's excuse, when they are pressed to give an excuse- The real reason that they prefer to drink from a dribble is jealousy that an older, wiser man (a much-hated Caucasian-type man) has taken charge of their mindless, no-thought-for the-future existence. (They have a deep-seated hatred of all things Caucasian, which they hide well.)

Mesick, though 40, has the maturity of an adolescent, and prefers the dribble, both from the jealousy standpoint above, and the facts that he drinks coffee from a cup and does not wash his hands except as incident to his daily shower. His method of germ-control is to leave a washcloth draped over the sink with which to instantly wipe up any drops of water that can't help but splash onto the top of the sink from handwashing, gargling, toothbrushing, clotheswashing, etc. This constant wiping up of water makes certain that this wipe-rag stays wet all the time the time, despite its always being spread out and "drying" on the lip of the sink. Moisture, dirt, skin cells and dust are all that bacteria and other microbes need to fester all over this "cleanliness" rag- And if this wasn't enough, this rag tends to somehow always get pushed down into the sink so that it wicks up into itself all the spit, filth and water that pools in the bottom of this poorly designed and worse-engineered "sanitary" facility. Mesick has no idea what "capillary action" is or any concept of "surface tension”,

He knows that a wick is what a candle has, but he will not shut his shouting-hole long enough for anyone, particularly any Caucasian, to explain to him how his sanitary procedures are creating a disease-infesting paradise. (Things that all minorities in this country have in common with each other are very strong lungs, explosively loud vocal apparatuses and an excitable disposition that prompts them to drown out educated discourse as soon as it is detected, with shrieks of immature nonsense.) Soon as Mesick realizes the point I'm trying to make, he attempts to trump my information by claiming that this festering disease-rag is soaked with bleach. I let him appear to have succeeded in duping me with this lie. I know that his culture of ignorant machismo with which they defy common sense has held him back and that his mind is locked against learning anything from me in my presence. I know the rag has no bleach on it because it does not stink of bleach. Bleach is very tightly rationed by the kops, and he and his smell-obsessed pal were in there last week turning the cage upside-down looking for a stink that just happened to be a bleach-soaked floor rag. (It is amazing how these people are always stumbling around with their noses cocked, searching out odd smells, as if they have nothing bigger on their minds than being the stink police) I know that it does no good to force the ignorant and resentful to add to their lies by exposing their current lies, so I say nothing. There is nothing but further resentment to be gained by trying to force an immediate correction upon the ignorant. To do so would only get his shout-hole shrieking. It is enough that the more intelligent of them may take advantage of new, better information and techniques after there is no possibility that I will see them do so.

Did I tell you that every surface of this prison is sticky? Every door handle is reeking with bacteria. Every pushplate on every door has a footwide encrustation of grime on it. Every handrail on both sides of every set of stairs seems to be covered with half-dried glue. Every table has a thin coating of slime that never completely dries or flakes away because the slime is constantly replenished by a wiping-rag dipped in a bucket of slime that was soapy water only during the first of eight separate chow lines.

The minorities here have zero class and zero shame. The prisoncrats thoughtfully provide only loose, no-belt, elastic-waisted, no-pocket jeanspajamas that actually entice inmates to indulge their one primary instinctual drive and prison vocation; fondling their genitals. It is a common occurrence for some needy minority to walk up with both hands in his crotch and ask any stranger for a free cup of coffee or to "borrow" anything he sees that you have. They will be shamelessly groping their genitals and flirting with the female guards, too. The guards, many of whom are themselves minorities, seem not to notice this filthy, uncivilized habit if they are Caucasian, or, if minority, to be amused or flattered by such gross behavior.

When the inmates are not digging in their crotches, they are often digging in their butts, ears, noses or mouths. Plus, they are often hacking up things they inhale and spitting them all over the place. (They smoke their dopes, including certain narcotic pills, in perhaps the stupidest ways possible, maximizing the amount of paper and cardboard that they inhale, thinking that this keeps them from wasting dope. They wrap a few tiny crumbs and dust of marijuana in much toilet paper packaging or Bible pages, because this "slows the burn", (and thus saves dope smoke.) Then they cut this "joint" into four pieces. Next they stick one in a slit in a cardboard toilet paper tube "steamroller" or plastic shampoo bottle "carburetor", light it with a smoldering wick of twisted toilet paper, then inhale these poisonous fumes until they taste the burning cardboard or melting plastic. This results in a tearful, coughing and hacking attack with much gasping, spitting and snot-slinging convulsions. The "high" that they experience is partly caused by the lack of oxygen and excess paper and plastic poisons. (Anyone with common sense can see that these few crumbs of marijuana dust can be easily inhaled in less than one breath, cleanly, with a flame on aluminum foil, but don't bother to suggest this to these addicts. They invariably determine to smoke much paper and plastic, as if addicted to these 200-plus extra poisons and the communal ritual of swapping spit with each other three more times.)

With all the extra hacking, gagging, snot-slinging and spitting that this occasions, the prisoncrats' dual policies of "no pockets" and "artificial toilet paper shortage" kick in to make certain that maximum amounts of body fluids spread the farthest possible distances. Prevented by the prisoncrats' "security" obsession from carrying handkerchiefs to wipe their dribbling mouths, eyes and noses, the spit, tears and snot is wiped off by bare hands, then flicked onto walls, floors and tables, and smeared onto handrails, pushplates and door handles.

To this environment of filth, add the crowding together of dirty people cheek-to -snout, drinking from each others' cups, eating from each others bowls and hand-jiving each other with complicated gangsta handshakes and monkey-pats. Each one of these many new mega-prisons has its own set of supermicrobes that constantly mutate and percolate through its particular isolated captive population. Here in Lawton's cesspit the respiratory disease is still king, and has apparently increased its hold on the inmate population from 6% to 11% in the past month since I caught it. (I wrote the CDC about this a month ago and they gave me a non-answer, seen elsewhere in my writings, yet the prisoncrat-medics of this place have begun inexplicably and quietly supplying pneumonia vaccine.) New arrivals get this supergerm and become very sick and ineffective. Then they become immune, if they survive, until it mutates through several other victims. Then it re-infects its previous victims, who suffer low-grade symptoms, functioning g as carriers and reservoirs of disease in a never-ending endemic centered on this prison. The "clinic" here is staffed with people who couldn't care less about these epidemics occurring right in front of them. When a captive is intelligent enough to point out this epidemic to them, they deny it. They appear to be, themselves, dregs of the medical profession, happy to protect their low-work, no-ambition jobs by trying to trick their captives into thinking that this 2400-captive germ incubator and microbe-mutation factory is merely a den of allergens, spider bites and nerve bumps.

The kops who work here, about 350 of them, appear strong and healthy all the time, as if they are immune to the diseases that we sickly inmates pass back and forth to each other. This is an illusion. The kops get eaten up by skin infections and respiratory infestations almost exactly as much as their captives do despite their use of rubber gloves to fondle us. It just seems not, because every time they get a chanker sore or sneeze, they take paid time off and go see real doctors and get real treatment.

The footrot is particularly strong here, too. It didn't take me a week of being here to notice that the skin between my little piggies was being eaten away and would soon begin cracking deeply enough to bleed. This super "athlete's" fungus has a different variety in each prison, which captives have to get immune to by catching it and fighting it off. For this reason, prison canteen sales of tolnaftate cream are always brisk. Coincidentally, Mesick is in charge of cleaning the showers. He, and other of his spanishspeaking homies, spend a lot of time in the shower; not cleaning it, however. They are crowded in there washing their sheets and blankies every weekend, in an hispanic version of a Chinese laundry. They wash the stuff with ivory soap in nasty, filthy mop buckets, sometimes adding the mystery cleaning chemicals that the prisoncrats supply in minimum quantities for other purposes. Meanwhile, the vents in the shower that blow cold air are covered with a thick, brown mat of something that looks like moss. Since there is nowhere to hang one's towel and clean boxers while perhaps six men are showering, I bent a paperclip into an "S" shape and hung the stuff from a hole in the vent. The moss rubbed off onto my clean stuff. The next day I came back and began scrubbing the crap off the vents. Mesick was there with his mop bucket. Like the perfect asshole he is, wanting to assert his business over every one else's, he shouts, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, homie! Watcha got goin' there?" It is as if this mat of filth is his pet or something. I say so, and he inexplicably shuts his noise-maker and concentrates on washing his blankie. The moss, it turns out, is a year or more accumulation of dust particles. They blow out the 432 air conditioning vent holes, hit the warm, moist, turbulent air of the showers, and stick like chewing gum to the humidity-soaked ones already on the grate. Now, how lazy, stupid or both do the 70 members of that minority pod-prison have to be for them to not notice in a year that two vents have half-inch thick mats of filth growing out of them? Maybe it has something to do with the behavior of genetically height-challenged persons being unlikely to look up or reach up more than a few inches above eye level. Maybe they did notice the dirtmonsters and were waiting for someone else to clean them up.

When they finish so scrubbing and rinsing their blankets and sheets, (which they swear come back dirty from the prison laundry), the kops will not let them be hung vertically out to dry in the common area. The theory here is that it blocks the kop's view, and they would be magnets for criminal behavior as all the inmates gather to hide behind them to smoke, beat each other up and enjoy much homosexual sex. At least this appears to be the kop's conclusions. They are trained to think this way, and usually they are correct to do so, based upon past experience. So the blankets and sheets get spread out on all the chairs, causing everyone to stand until they dry, which is a very slow process in a cage with 70 people continually exhaling moisture. The sheets get hung up inside the two-man cages, so we have the shanty-town look both inside and "outside".

Another microbe that Lawton is working on in its incubator is a new version of the eye infection. This one is hard to detect in others, but a guy certainly knows when he has it himself. This one feels like three bumps on my eyelid, scratching my cornea every time I blink. It's not nearly as bad as what that buffoon gave me in "Malpractice as a Goal", but it's bad enough. Maybe I've still got a little immunity going on from his disease, because these three bumps are small, and they are going away by themselves after about five days.

A disease that is NOT going away, however, is a thing that is making my scalp itch. The nice thing about it is that it is intermittent rather than constant, the itch-attack is usually only in the morning upon wake-up, and a shower seems to help make it go away for a day.

Instead of hiding these filthy and disease-ridden conditions in its mega-prisons, DOC and CEO should advertise them. If young punks were able to see the results of being locked away for excessively long periods for the profit of politicians and their corporate masters, even career pilferers such as Mesick: and the trash from Mexico may think twice the next time they decide to steal your car or rape-murder your daughter.