Pat, the Pants and the Prison
by Patrick WensinkI'm standing in the same spot Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thorton have, but I'm wearing another man's pants. There's a guy holding a rifle right above my head who claims he could shoot me from a hundred yards away. I'm warned that any moment I could be held hostage by convicted felons and nobody is responsible for my well-being. Welcome to the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), the Beaver State's only maximum-security jail.
Not many office field trips require a background check, but this is no normal trip. It also includes a metal detector sweep and, unknown to me, a dress code.
I show up to work ready to tour the biggest set of iron bars in Oregon, ready for a prison riot, ready for inmate catcalls…ready, possibly, to be stabbed with a knife carved from soap.
"Duude," my supervisor says first thing. "Didn't you get the email? What are you wearing?"
My office is really laid back. So relaxed, it's perfectly acceptable for your supervisor to call you, "Dude." Luckily, it’s also the kind of employer that o ffers educational trips to the state penitentiary.
“What?” I say, wearing the same thing I wear everyday: Sweater, jeans and tennis shoes. Now if I slipped into a fish net tank-top I can see where I might get into a jam during our tour of the maximum security jail today.
"The jeans," he says expecting me to get it.
We kind of eye each other, waiting for someone to fill in the enormous gap here.
"You can't wear jeans to a prison," he says.
"Why not?"
"Because the inmates wear jeans, you might get mistaken for a prisoner," he tells me in a, DUHHHH kind-of voice. "Didn't you get the email?"
Obviously not. Luckily, as a law firm, my office provides dress clothes to clients who can't afford them. We have a fully stocked walk-in closet.
I slip on a pair of brown slacks and a recent email from another co-worker whispers into my head. "Wash your hands a lot. I just went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a staph infection on my legs. Even though my legs never touched a client, somehow their bedbugs decided to get into my skin."
Could these be the pants of the staph infection guy, I wonder. Even though the office washes the clothes after they're worn, can you truly disinfect a staph infection? Should I try another pair? What if those are the infected pants? What if they have something worse, like hepatitis? Maybe I'm lucky with a staph infection.
My legs start itching immediately.
The big house, while scarved in barbed wire and a huge concrete wall, doesn't quite look like movies and TV and after-school specials want you to think prison does.
It's canary yellow. Not brick red. Not granite gray. It may as well be molded from Easter Peeps. I'm sure some board of directors sat down and digested a lot of research to find out what color best expresses, "Cheer up, you're only doing twenty-to-life."
The entire place is some skull-crushing mix of pop culture myth and dark reality. Fact and fiction play the old switcharoo, wearing one-another’s pants like a bizarre prison escape plan.
"Welcome to OSP, I have to warn you, there is always a risk of being wounded, taken hostage..." our tour guide, Aaron, says. He's a beefy guy with a mustache. He could juggle three of me he's so big. Aaron warns us of other horrible, Chuck Norris-type scenarios that can happen, but I zone out in fear. I snap back when he goes into, "We do not negotiate with hostage takers. Even if the Governor himself were taken in, we'd treat him the same as if you were."
I find this hard to believe. I check over my shoulder, Oregon Governor Ted Kolungoski is nowhere to be seen. Now I'm worried.
After searching us for guns and knives made of soap the guards lock us behind iron bars. This is where Aaron drops the next payload on us, "We have about twenty-two hundred inmates here. However, we only have about thirty-five guards on duty."
Holy shit, I'm not making it out alive. Thanks to budget cutbacks this place is teetering on the edge of a prison riot and I'm a pasty chunk of meat for them to pass around.
The only thing keeping me from huddling into a sobbing-wet ball on the floor is the security of knowing murderers, rapists, drug addicts and tax evaders are locked up tight and nibbling bread and water as I walk around catching unknown diseases from my itchy pants.
This, like what color prison walls are, is a myth that TV has pulled over my eyes.
We walk through another huge, bright yellow, steel door into the artery of this monster. And I smell the riot on the horizon.
Hundreds of prisoners swarm in and out of doors—unaccompanied by guards—free to stab and strangle at will. But they mostly just stare and scurry along like they're late to Algebra.
None of the guards seem to mind, so I assume this is normal. And sure enough, everyone wears denim: jeans, jean jackets, even jean shirts...it's like a John Denver clothing catalogue, but with lots of tattoos.
Cell Block C is first on our tour. And to my surprise, it actually looks like a prison. Five stories of shoebox cells and thick bars. It's long and holds about a quarter of the inmates. It'd be really depressing too, if every cell wasn't painted a different shade of cutesy pastel.
"Look on the bright side, Inmate #76990, at least you're not in solitary," the colors gently remind prisoners.
Cells are cramped and dark and the inmates are respectfully quiet. Nobody tosses buckets of urine at us. Nobody blows the harmonica. No catcalls.
We exit into a sandpit of denim and glares. Our guide ushers us to the corner and explains that outdoor time in the Yard is over and inmates are heading back to their cells. Everyone, without exception, stares at us. What did this guy do? I wonder. Armed robbery? Kidnapping? Molesting grown men in borrowed corduroy pants?
"I would estimate," Aaron says, unprovoked. "That eighty-percent of the men you see right now are sex offenders."
Even my staph infection gets the creeps.
I've never been undressed with someone's eyes, but I assume inmates are stripping me right now. The pores of my skin cough and wiggle in horror. I get the sudden urge to apologize to every model that ever posed in one of my sister's Cosmo magazines when I was a kid.
Before this morning, I assumed the Yard is nothing more than a weight bench and a mud pit. This too, is a myth. It's actually huge, with five basketball courts, a sand volleyball pit, miniature golf course, a garden, a running track, telephones and even two softball fields.
Apparently, OSP hosts summer tournaments with local softball teams of unincarcerated citizens. Something tells me stealing third is second nature to the OSP Fighting Eagles.
Here are some more myths debunked on my trip.
MYTH—prison food consists of bread, water and loaves of entrails: Lunch today is chicken parmesan and pulled pork for dinner. The cafeteria looks a lot like my high school one, except the prisoners get a Coke fountain. What does that say about public schools?
MYTH—inmates sit on their ass all day and think of new ways to carve knives out of soap: Wrong again—almost all inmates are required to work at one of the three factories on site: the state's third largest laundry facility, a metal shop and a furniture shop. Once, Aaron says, an inmate actually sewed himself into a couch to escape. He didn't get far.
Surprisingly, all the furniture is made for government offices and state colleges (like the prisoner-invented “Indestructible Dorm Chairs”). I take comfort knowing while Governor Kolungoski isn't here to bail me out of a riot, he is probably typing at a desk made by an inmate.
MYTH—there is a magic button, just like in the movies, that opens all the cell doors and frees the prisoners to riot and murder: Still wrong. I specifically ask Aaron and he assures me that would be the worst addition any prison could make. But they do have switches that CLOSE all the doors and other switches to cut the power or the water and other utilities in case of riots.
Wonderful, I think. So while some dude holds me hostage with a soap knife to my throat I won’t even be able to flush the toilet.
MYTH—people get tossed in "The Hole": If there's really a Hole, they hide it well. OSP has certain levels of security for hard to handle guys, but even death row inmates are given 45 minutes of outdoor time a day.
We walk on and stand alongside a huge razor wire fence circling the Yard. Aaron asks if anyone's ever seen the film, Bandits. Because this is the spot where Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thorton escape from prison in a cement truck.
The Hollywood crew actually set up shop and filmed here because unlike most maximum security Hiltons, OSP still has a mean-ass concrete wall that people imagine when they think of prison, albeit the same color as a rubber ducky.
Aaron and his mustache aren’t just shattering myths, but here are some truths about prison as well.
FACT—it smells bad: Oddly, the entire place, especially the high security areas, smells like onions.
FACT—tower guards shoot to kill: As far as I can tell, yes. Like I said, guards are trained to hit someone a football field away. And to prove they mean business there are strategic pits of sand around the perimeter. This allows sharpshooters to pop off a warning bullet into something other than my stomach. Eerily enough, each one has a smiley face etched into it.
FACT—it's pretty freaking impossible to escape: The old standard "Dig a Tunnel" won't work unless that inmate is part sea lion. OSP purposely dropped its cheerful yellow wall ten feet into the ground, which is about where the water shelf begins. So in order to get under the wall, you also go underwater.
You're also not going to hop in a laundry sack and be smuggled out with the dirty underwear. They figured this one out by using some super-monitor at the gates that detects heartbeats. According to the guide, this thing is so sensitive it can tell if a cat's heart is thumping in the truck. My tax dollars hard at work.
But as anyone who's ever been stabbed by a soapy knife can tell you, prisoners are always thinking of new ways to beat the man. So it's not long until someone figures a way out, I assume.
On to the maximum security bunker.
It's three stories of Oregon's worst criminals and Aaron eagerly shows us around. Inside, it's a state-of-the-art chimpanzee cage. This place is dark and circular and heavily guarded. The cells are bare with Plexiglas covering the bars. Nothing is painted to resemble an Easter egg. This room would split Hannibal Lechter in two.
The biggest myth debunked is at the opposite end of this building.
FACT—the death chamber isn't a dungeon with iron shackles and water dripping from the ceiling. It looks, oddly, like my cubicle at work. Except IT has a window…though to the viewing room.
There's a flimsy partition where executioner sits and on the other side is a hospital bed with lots of leather straps. According to our guide, they inject the condemned with enough poison to kill a horse.
I'm standing close enough to smell the linens on the stretcher. Once again, my scabies get the scabies and I leave.
On my way out, one last myth is proven true.
FACT—the governor can stop an execution: Next to the exit is a little red phone labeled, "Governor". It leads to a little red phone on Kolungoski's OSP-prisoner-made desk. I think about picking it up and asking if he knows what happens if he’s caught in the middle of a prison riot. But I assume I'll get a pastel cell of my own.
Just like everything else in this world portrayed by television and movies, prison is a mixture of fact and fiction and the truth is a lot less romantic than we'd like to think it is. But it’s not the end of the world, remember what the yellow cell tells us, "Life without parole ain't so bad, at least you don't have a soap knife in your back."
Posted on 2009-07-13