March 22, 2010
"There's 50 pounds of brown sugar missing from the kitchen and weapons grade steel missing from one of the housing units! Give em up and the cell searches will stop!" a CO announced, as three other CO's and a Sargent began to ransack the cells on my run.
"The kick-plates on the doors here are aluminum, not steel, and it was missing when we got here!" an orangeman yelled from the cluster of angry prisoners watching their stuff being messed up. "What the fuck? 50 pounds of sugar or a piece of steel isn't in my Tylenol bottle!" another orangeman added, seeing the bottle fly out of his cell, bouncing around the hallway. It was obvious that this shakedown wasn't only to look for missing things.
The missing piece of metal was missing upon our arrival, according to the guys in that cellblock, but better safe than sorry when it comes to locating weapons if they exist on a yard. Ironically, COs did find multiple pieces of steel rebar in the ground with their metal detectors. Obviously left from the unit's construction days judging by the rusted condition. Steel rebar has been used as a weapon in prisons and jails for ages and I've seen heads caved in, bones broken and big gaping holes in bodies caused by this nasty stuff. It's scary stuff!
The kick-plate was never found. Nor the sugar. But the fact remains that tons of "weapon-grade" material was, and is missing from the new unit that ADOC is leasing, and the buildings are falling apart and can easily be scavenged by anyone. The tax dollars ADDED to ADOC's budget for this unit; callously taken from Az's Public Health Care and Education, should at least cover needed repairs and such to the facility. If our state government chooses to turn its back on its most vulnerable and needy citizens to give to the prison system, it should not be allowed to ignore its responsibility to protect its prisoners' safety as well as the prison staff. There's more to safely running a prison than turning the lights on and adding prisoners and staff.
Regarding the missing sugar: I work in the kitchen and get strip-searched when leaving. How did 50 lbs. of brown sugar get out of the kitchen?
Blog administrator note: Readers are invited to answer that "rhetorical" question about the missing sugar with their own ideas and guesses.
3 days ago
4 comments:
Civilian kitchen staff & correction officers are NOT searched going out. Just a thought, I could be wrong, but I doubt it. It's always easier to place blame on those in orange. Keep it up Shannen, they only fear the light of day and funding cuts. It not about justice, it's about money!
according to a blog I did with Wild Man, it took him a week to get 5 pounds of sugar smuggled out of the kitchen to make hooch with:
“How about the sugar?”
“The baker in the kitchen has access to a good amount of sugar. I tell him I’ll give him five bottles of hooch for five pounds of sugar, two big bags basically. He puts it all in cling-film, which he makes the size of sausage rolls. Before the chow hall opens, he tapes it under the tables where the heads of the whites and their torpedoes [goons] sit. If you look under the tables, you’ll see it, but for the naked eye there’s nothing there. When the heads walk in, the white boys give the heads hugs, and generally creep up their arses, meanwhile the torpedoes are grabbing the sugar and passing it to the youngsters. The youngsters have on really baggy pants. Now nine times out of ten, the guards will pat you down for weapons going into the chow hall, but not when you’re walking out. It takes a week to get all the stolen stuff together.”
here's the link to Wild Man's blog on hooch manufacturing:
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/2009/12/wild-man-makes-prison-hooch-wild-man-my.html
Thanks for the comments...some "food" for thought! I questioned my son about this, and he seemed to agree that really, it isn't too difficult to get things out of the kitchen-at least judging by what people managed to take. He found peanut butter in a laundry load-perhaps someone was afraid of getting caught and ditched it in the dirty clothes.
Sue O.
Blog Administrator
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