Prison Puzzle Pieces 3. Dave Basham
you would see from juveniles in a junior high school lavatory rather than mature adults working in a potentially volatile environment trying to support themselves and their families. You could tell by the content of these writings that those who wrote them were ignorant buffoons. I’m telling you, Plato doesn’t work here. These foul writings and artwork slammed and degenerated inmates as a group and specific officers and big shots. Some of it was from decades ago, probably making it of historical value, like the hieroglyphics in Egypt. Some of it was current communications. That means that I was working with some of these idiots.
PENNY WISE AND DOLLAR FOOLISH
Every tower had binoculars. I should say that every tower had binoculars that were total crap. They may as well throw them out. I could see better with just my eyes. The amount of money I saw wasted in this place, they could have easily afforded decent binoculars for these towers. Hopefully they have replaced them by now. They had a policy that stated never to use the scope on the rifle as a binocular. That’s common sense, but isn’t it also common sense to have decent binoculars available?
TOWER 1
Tower 1 was a deprived tower. It had a micro wave, but it didn’t work. It had a radio, but it didn’t work. It had fewer weapons than the other towers, but it was sufficient. It had no catwalk and was very small.
It didn’t even have a stool to sit on. There was a chair, but no stool. You could only see out of the windows if you were at the height of a stool. Who is going to stand eight hours straight when there is a chair to sit on every once in a while?
A captain passed by below my tower once when I had sat on the chair to rest my feet. She chastised me over the radio for the entire institution to hear. It was on Third Watch. I had worked Second Watch that day. A lot of Third Watch officers called in sick as it was a nice day. I was forced to work another shift. Needless to say, I was not very happy with this entire situation.
TOWER 2
Tower 2 had no catwalk. This tower was prime for observing the natives pipe and drum ceremonies.
TOWER 3
Tower 3 is the main entry through the prison walls. Several officers with high seniority are stationed at this main gate. It has the largest catwalk of all of the towers.
One time, my first time in tower 3, a driver from Cass County needed to get inside the wall to either pick up or drop off an inmate. The gate wouldn’t open. The officer below passed it off to the driver that the problem was with me being new. I said there must be a blown circuit or some type of an electrical problem. He said no way. He came up and couldn’t get it to open. He sent another guy up who couldn’t do anything either. They had to get the guy in through the gate at tower 6. Electricians worked several days trying to correct the electrical problem on Tower 3. Once again, I was underestimated. I had a lot more experience in a lot more areas than these arrogant jerks.
TOWER 4
Tower 4 is the prime tower for observing inmates going back and forth to the industry buildings. This was an extremely difficult tower to access during the winter. This tower had a working microwave, but no catwalk.
TOWER 5
Tower 5 was condemned because it was not safe to enter. Pigeons roosted in this one. It was made functional when they revamped all of the towers at one time.
TOWER 6
Tower 6 is the second largest tower. It has a truck gate that is used primarily if the gate at tower 3 is having problems. This tower has a small catwalk area.
HELL IN TOWER 7
One of my worst experiences was when I was assigned to work tower 7 on a day that started out over 20 degrees below zero with a strong wind blowing. I guess that would actually be the opposite of hell. I dressed warm, but there was no way to keep warm in these conditions. There was no heat. The radiator was colder than ice.
Speaking of ice, I had brought a bottle of water to drink. It froze in about 10 minutes, so I had nothing to drink during my roughly 0615 to 1415 shift in this tower.
The front window frame in this tower had either deteriorated or been busted out before I started here. An old section of window in a flimsy metal frame had been fastened over part of it at the top; scrap plywood covered the rest. Because this make shift window wasn’t fastened all the way around, the wind was blowing it up several inches and the cold wind was blowing in. There were newspapers lying around in the tower, so I tried cramming some of them in the gap. The wind just blew the window out even further. Some of the papers flew around in the yard and some flew over the wall. I guess if anyone would’ve come out in this cold weather and seen those papers come out of my tower, I would’ve been in trouble for trying to keep from freezing.
Inmates were kept inside the prison out of the extreme cold until late into my shift when the light of day got the temperature up to around zero. A few inmates stepped out, but only for a short time. I think they just wanted to play macho to the other inmates; the ones that had the sense to stay indoors.
If I would’ve had to use a rifle, I doubt that I could’ve handled it well enough to do any good as my fingers were frozen along with my toes.
Towers are boring enough when the weather was nice, much less having to deal with trying to stay functional in these extreme conditions.
FIGHTING THE BOREDOM
We are not supposed to have radios to listen to; the kind of radio that had stations with music playing. We are supposed to be 100% focused on the job. Officers had smuggled radios into most of the towers anyway. For some reason, it was difficult to get any decent reception in those towers. If you played the radio, you better make sure you turn it off before you answer a phone or respond on your radio so no one would hear it. Most higher ups that had risen to their position from the bottom, where I was, were lenient on this. They had been there. They knew anything to help alleviate the boredom would help keep you more alert. Some of them applied some common sense to the situation, but not all of them.
One lieutenant would go to the top floor of an industry building with binoculars. He would watch for officers reading books, newspapers or magazines. He would try to catch officers dozing off. He would enter cellblocks and try to catch officers with their feet up on the railing at the shower post. I heard that he was one of the worst at doing things like this early in his career. Here he was, always on the hunt for someone to write up, and he did the same things when he was an officer.
I could see if he was going after the ones that stretched the line a bit too far, like taking a sleeping bag to the tower along with a VCR and a television. Taking up a laptop computer was probably going a bit too far too.
When working a tower, I felt like licking the toilet bowl, so I could get sick. Then at least I could sit there and have something to do.
Now I see why people take up smoking. It’s something people can do to try to pass some time while they slowly kill themselves, so they don’t have to be up in a tower bored to death.
Since I worked in the prison, the least little movement catches my eye.
We must acknowledge higher ups with a wave. I guess that’s so long as we know who the higher ups are.
No one is allowed to take pictures of the wall, towers, etc.
No one is allowed on state grounds. If you find people behind the towers, call it in.
We were also told to always keep clothing and food in our cars, just in case we got assigned to a tower.
RADIATORS
The radiators in these towers rarely