Visiting Hours
It is a cold and rainy Saturday morning and I am sitting in an outdoor waiting room that resembles a bus stop shelter. The benches are cold institutional steel and the only thing on them is a scratched-off instant lottery ticket that is testament to the loser lifestyle. There is a small space heater cranking out heat and had it been summer, there is a small window air conditioner to keep things cool. This structure sits on the sidewalk and it is neither inside nor outside. This is the closest I have ever felt like I am in purgatory.
I am sitting outside the Metropolitan Detention Center of the Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons. I am here to visit a friend who is incarcerated inside this ten-story blockhouse of a building that sits between the Brooklyn waterfront and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I have ridden past it a thousand times without knowing what this is and what’s going on inside. There are a million stories inside these walls and as a storyteller, I am interested to go in to see what I will see.
The visiting hours start at 8:00am this morning and so far I am the only person bothering to wait for the ability to go in to see how I can give moral support to a friend hard on his luck. He has told me to bring $25 in small bills so we can enjoy snacks during the visit.
As I discuss entry into the visiting area of the facility, I note that there is a distinct lack of customer service from the prison guards. Fill out a form. No, I do not have a pen, you are supposed to bring one. No, you cannot fill it out in here, you must do that outside in the rain. No, that’s not the right way to fill it out, go back outside and do it this way, stupid. Now give me your ID and take this locker key and put all your stuff in there. Yes, even your cap. Now put everything in your pockets, your belt and your shoes in the bin and go through two metal detectors. Pull your pants pockets out before you do it. Now you get an invisible stamp on your hand . Now sign our visitor book and sit over here. Now move past the first set of jailhouse doors and sit over there. Now wait.
While waiting in this semi-interior sanctum, I notice that there are five framed photographs on the wall arrayed like wanted posters. I recognize two of the photographs. The one in the middle is Attorney General William Barr with a dour frown and the one in the upper left is President Donald Trump with a cheery smile on his face. I wonder whether Donald Trump realizes that Bill Barr has placed himself as the big cheese on this wall array with Donald just one of the other people on display. From what I know of the man, this would not go over so well with him. The other thing that this display brings to mind is that we are meant to view these officials with admiration that we have such good law and order types to keep our democracy safe. Since at least two of those pictured are what I would considered unindicted co-conspirators to a massive conspiracy against the people of the United States, the admiration part of the equation slips by me unnoticed.
By now I’ve been joined by a half dozen other visitors. We wait until a bell sounds and we line up at a door and go into an enclosed hallway with a bulletproof guard station. There we pass our hands, one-by-one, under an ultraviolet light to verify that we have the proper visitor stamp on our hands. That gains us admittance into the large visiting room where guards behind a large elevated desk take our entry forms and direct us to specified seats. All the chairs are placed in rows inside of red painted boxes on the floor. There is a large sign on the wall that says very clearly that no chairs may be outside of the red boxes. Presumably this is to insure we don’t sit too close to the criminal element. We are free to take a small plastic table on which to place snacks between us. These are not restricted to the red boxes. Now we sit and wait for our prisoners while we look around the room.
At the far end of the room are a line of vending machines for beverages and snacks. They look rather slim in terms of pickings, but there is a man with a cart full of replacement snacks working hard to fill up the machines for what promises to be a busy day. At this point there are perhaps ten of the 200 plastic chairs in the room occupied. That is when a guard comes over to us and tells us that spacing ourselves on every other chair as we have is fine for now, but as the room fills we will need to tighten up our seating formation. We look around and the empty 190 or so chairs and just say OK. Someone wants to use the bathroom and it seems to be locked. After some back and forth the key is found and a bathroom procedure is established that has us turning in our locker keys for the bathroom key. This is a trade that needs to be contemplated, but only if your bathroom need is not too urgent.
Finally, the prisoners start filtering into the room. They are all dressed in green kaki shirts and pants. The pants have elastic waists since belts are not allowed. WHen prisoners want to relieve themselves they have a separate bathroom, but a guard has to accompany them into the bathroom to make sure they are not spiriting away any contraband. My friend tells me that that’s silly since you buy contraband from the guards themselves. The biggest item of value seems to be a working cell phone, which is available for $1,500 with about an hour’s worth of talk time. Otherwise, food items are the currency among prisoners with a packaged mackerel being the most circulated bill since it can be purchased for $1 and no one seems to want to actually eat it. This brings a whole new meaning to an old expression about there being eating sardines and trading sardines.
My friend asks me what’s happening. I can’t talk about politics as new because he watches three hours of MSNBC, two hours of CNN and two hours of Fox News daily, so he is probably more current than I am on what is going on in the world. I give him the update on the personal front and he says that comports with what he has been reading in my blog posts. Then I tell him what’s happening at work and he says that hasn’t changed in a month, and I find myself agreeing. We are then out of things to discuss.
It turns out that I cannot leave until the “count” has been verified. No one will explain this nor will they predict when it will be accomplished. So for thirty minutes or so I am actually a detainee in the Federal Prison System. It feels weird. When they tell me I can go, I shake my friend’s hand. He asks that I be nice enough to his next visitor to tell them they can proceed with their visit. On the way out, I go through a reverse of the entry procedure, with my hand being inspected for its appropriate invisible black light stamp. I collect my possessions and listen as one visitor claims to have had a cell phone taken that he cannot find. I’m thinking its already in the hands of a prisoner and some guard is $1,500 richer. I wonder if an iPhone 11 carries a premium. My Uber arrives in two minutes, which is faster than I can do at home, so I am off to my next adventure.