Letters from Club Fed (2/3)

This is a three part post of a letter from Michael Hanelt (my partner-in-prison) to me on 9/10/04. You can read the first part here.

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10:00 AM Lunchtime! Of course, I’ve missed breakfast (5:30-6:30) so by now I’m ready to eat. The menu ranges from awful thru pretty good, depending upon budget crisis. As you may be aware (or not) the prison system in the U.S. of A. holds more population per capita than any country in the world, incarcerated, somewhere between around 2.2 million men and women behind bars. Anyway, I digress.

One can always count on rice and beans as a staple, and generally a fresh salad bar. The rest of the menu changes daily. Could be grilled cheese sandwiches (Don’t get too excited—one piece of cheese only!), or spaghetti with choice of marinara or meat sauce, which until recently was 50% ground organ meat…lungs, kidneys, liver, and various other “unusable extraneous animal psrts”… now down to 15%), Philly Cheese Steak (low grade beef, sometimes buffalo meat, sometimes undefinable), burgers & onion rings (actually pretty good!) chili (again, that organ meat problem), corn dogs (yecch!!) etc. The bottom line is we have some good days and some bad. A lot of fried foods, high fat foods, freezer burned, out of date foods. And let me expand a little on the “out of date” issue. We’re not talking a week to 10 days out of date, we’re talking months to years out of date! And did I mention the bags of frozen corn marked, “not for human consumption”!???

10:30 AM Time for a quick after-lunch gig and then it’s back to work. At this point, some of the work crews are beginning to come back into the camp for lunch. About ½ the crews are given box lunches and don’t get back until 2:30 pm. Pity those who don’t make it to pick up their laundry before 10:00, because they’re out of luck until tomorrow, but for those who can squeeze in lunch and commissary. They can still make it into the laundry to pick up laundered clothing or replace missing, lost or damaged items. (I’ll do a while diatribe on the entire laundry crew at some future date. It’s a bizarre study of human nature.) I have a flurry of activity till about 11:30 and then we wind down till closing.

12:00 Noon Another work day is over and a whopping $2.03 added to my payroll account. I head back to the dorm, lay down on my bunk and pull out my book de jour. I have become a voracious reader. As of this reading, I am on book #172. Not bad for 18 months, eh? Within 15-30 minutes, my eyelids are drooping. Time for my daily nap.

I usually get in a pretty fair nap, from 12:30 to 3:00. By 3pm, most of the work crews are back in camp and the noise level has risen to intolerable. This is something one never gets used to in prison. The noise! It’s absolutely mind boggling! Far be it from me to make generalizations, especially along racial boundaries, but they exist nonetheless. The Latin boys don’t speak to each other, they yell at the top of their lungs… Really, no joke. There is no normal conversation level; everyone in the dorm has to be able to hear what they’re saying. If they’re showering or making use of the “rest facilities,” they’re yelling across stalls, if the need to talk to a buddy 3 cubes down, they yell across to each other, if they’re standing in a group, everyone within 50 feet has to be able to hear their conversation. Their “normal conversation level” seems to be 4-6 times mine. Who knows, maybe it’s part of their culture?

Next: 3:30PM

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Note from Cary: I’m taking up a collection so Mike can get a new pair of sneakers!!! $65. Any help is appreciated! You can email Michael at mike@ this domain name (see link upper right).