Prison Work James Bauhaus 2011

I get the impression that a high value is placed on whether a captive can land one of the scarce, sought-after prison jobs, such as maintenance I had one of these jobs, working as a plumber at the Okie Hominy prison. It was not much like maintenance, plumbing or electrical jobs I had had while a refugee from this fraudulently-obtained life sentence. We began our day at work at 6:30AM, but, instead of working, we slept until 8:30 or 9:00 because this was when the morning head count operation occurred.

It took them a long time to count people in their cages. Once it was tallied, we could go about our rounds with heavy too lbelts to fix sinks, toilets, showers, water coolers and drains. Even this did not add up to much, though we kept at it, and it was mostly steady work until lunch, which wasted two hours, mostly due to another count. Then we worked until 3 or 3:30 .

This was our "day", and during it, two crews could genera generally keep up with everything that went wrong with this 480 (2-man) cage prison, including their single-cage lockups totaling about another 40 cages.

These 4-hour "days" left us with plenty of time left over to stand around and talk to everyone we passed on the sidewalks between the 6 miniprisons. Much of our time was wasted waiting for the kop to come by and unlock gates to let us in or out of fenced-in areas. We spent much time getting past all these locked gates and doors to get extra parts or tools which we did not know that we needed, and then getting back to the work site. A favorite destination for us was the kitchen, to pretend to inspect something, and to graze or pilfer food. Most times we did fix something however minor. The kitchen is full of poorly mounted sink-tables that are often bashed with food carts, rupturing the water- or drain-lines that are themselves poorly emplaced.

One of the primary things that the captives despise most is being forced to push a button for water with one hand while trying to make the other hand wash itself. Every sink is broken in that they no longer keep water running for 3 to 6 seconds after a cold or hot water button is pushed. Particularly spry individuals will sometimes try to raise our foot to the sink and mash the button with our heel while trying to wash both hands at once, but mostly captives simply do not bother to wash their hands. It is simply too much trouble, and hands seem clean enough to illiterates when you just wet them and wipe them on a dirty towel. But some captives want more, and are willing to pay for the privilege of cleanliness in themselves and that nasty fellow we are forced to live with. Nobody wants him spreading to our things the supergerms that he brings in from nasty habits with his friends.

One of the plumbers specializes in collecting three packs of cigarettes for fixing this problem. His name is Jimmie Dreg Smith, a heroin addict and torturephile who killed his girlfriend over dope with his mother. He went to the prison plumbing school. He is very clever in manipulating people, but much less so in applying ghetto engineering to the push button sinks.

The main captive plumber let Smith watch while he did it a few times, and Smith was able to ape the process, more or less, then make a short career out of it before being caught with a needle in his arm and getting fired.

I was unfortunate enough to have Smith assigned to me as "crew". Unfortunate because he is a greedy, opportunist-addict who brought heat on everyone he was near because he was of the habit of owing everyone and never paying his debts without a fight. Also, his learning curve concerning mechanical things is long and shallow. It began with him trying to figure out how to solder a stop-valve onto a piece of copper tubing. (A stopvalve is found under your bathroom sink for each of the two water lines. They were not designed to act as faucets, as Smith intends, only as shutoffs so that the washers in faucets may be replaced. When used as faucets, their washers wear out doubly quickly.) As this proscribed activity is incompetent plumbing, as well as a rule infraction, I do not help him. After wasting 95 minutes and many cubic feet of butane on a 2-minute task, Smith is satisfied with having connected two pipes to two stopvalves, one for each pushbutton. Both have large blobs of solder attached that had to be torn up from the table he had been working from. He gets two compression connectors. We go to the guy who paid him and begin the illegal adventure in ghetto plumbing.

He chops the anchor bolts to the plumbing chase panel, rips it open, and sends me to get the kop to let me in the utility room where I shut off the water to 80 people. Smith, apparently having no foresight at all, stupidly cuts both pipes off almost at floor level, leaving only 2-inch nubs with which to attach the compression fittings. He dismantles the sink, shoves the pipes in the pushbutton holes up to the stop valves. Then he points them roughly down, so that they spew into the sink, but they just float there, unattached to the sink. Twisting the valve open and shut also twists the 1/4 inch copper tube that they are attached to. This job will require intense maintenance over time, beginning with frequent washer replace-ment as new inhabitants of these cages all learn the hard way that cranking the water off too hard destroys the washer in this fitting whose normal function is to remain open for years at a time. Every time a washer is replaced, 80 people get their water turned off for at least 20 minutes. When it is turned back on, we have to go to each cage, flush the toilet, then wait to see if it shuts off. About 5% of them keep running. These we have to stop manually, by cutting open the plumbing chase door, screwing it off and back open, then flushing it again. This usually works, so we close the door, anchor it shut again, and proceed to the next. All this, just so Smith can make 3 packs of cigarettes and go get a shot off a morphine pill. But wait: There is more: Smith has cut the pipe so short that he can not get his channel-locks onto the nuts of the compression fitting that joins the source to the pipe. He struggles mightily, managing to grind the corners off these soft copper fittings. Even if the thing doesn't leak when we turn the water back on, the next guy is going to have hell getting it off without damaging the nubs beyond repair that Smith left. Worse, even if they do leak, Smith is likely to just pretend it doesn't and leave, quickly. A week later, someone notices the puddle that keeps leaking from the wall into the cage and contacts maintenance for a fix.

We turn the water back on. Miraculously, it does not leak, but it does emit loud, rapid bangs when it is turned on , or the pipe will slam out a quarter inch every time it is turned off. This is called water hammer and it occurs because Smith has cut out the vertical tubes that hold air to absorb the shock of water moving at high speed through narrow pipes. Apparently he missed this day of plumbing school, or he was in an opioid stupor when they covered water hammer. What does he do to 'fix' it? He peels off a few yards of thick, insulated copper wire from our spool and begins spiderwebbing it between all the pipes in the chase. Apparently he thinks that this will cure the vibration problem. What it actually does is show us who is responsible for creating the slow leak that took two weeks to manifest itself. The slamming and banging noises continue, unaffected by his concentrated efforts. Smith convinces his even more ignorant client that the noise will gradually go away as the air in the lines escapes. Smith collects his money and proceeds to his next client.

I suffered Smith and these typical days for months, watching helplessly as he pulled one expensive, destructive, bone-head move after another. He idiotically tightened a wall-mount toilet bolt til he broke the porcelain flange, costing $120. He installed a ghetto sink at least once/week. He made and sold bongs out of PVC joints without telling anyone we needed to re-stock these essential parts. (They are also toxic to smoke from, since they give you cancer.) We found out the hard way, stuck in a cold, wet ditch in the icy wind while the supervisor went to town to buy more.

The first thing that most of us plumbers would do, when we could, is fix our own sinks. Smith watched us connect our stop valves with pipes that led to a single outlet, allowing us to mix cold and hot water to our desire. He copied these contraptions and began selling them to clients for a few bucks more. The trouble with them is that they would shoot the water at such high speed that much of it would splash outside these tiny sinks and onto the floor soon as you put your hands in the stream.  This mopping up problem finally caused me to design a ghetto faucet that would gently drop water into the sink instead of shooting it. It was just a matter of introducing turbulent friction, to soak up the excess energy. All it took was to add a larger diameter pipe that rose vertically before curving over for the water to spill down into the sink. The first prototype worked perfectly, but was overbuilt. Smith copied it, but made it shorter and thus better at not setting off any fear-tingles in the kops who may see it. Weeks later, Smith claimed that he had invented my turbulent-flow faucet, adding that the kops had called him to remove it as a possible weapon after I had moved out. (It was an 8-inch tall, 1/2 inch pipe with a sharp 180 degree curve at the top. Smith's version was much shorter and only had a 3-inch bulge in the middle.) I found out later that he had simply stolen it on this excuse from the guy who had inherited it, then sold it to another client, saving him the trouble of making another one.

This is a small snapshot of prison "work". All prison work is similar to this; barely competent, hugely inefficient, costly and often destructive. Forcing already competent and conscientious persons to do it probably makes them sloppy, inefficient, destructive and uncaring.