Wonderful Lompoc

July 2, 2008

I know lt’s been a long time since I’ve posted so this one stands to be a long one. It may very well extend into several parts as my good friend has to type it in and he’s pretty busy these days as well. Anyway, thanks for reading. By now everyone knows that I’ve been relocated to Lompoc Federal Prison Camp in central California about 2S miles north of Santa Barbara just a bit in from the coast. The camp sits in the middle of a gigantic farm which is owned and operated by the Bureau of Prisons. The camp is also next to the old Lompoc Penitentiary which is now the Lompoc Federal Corrections Instltutlon. The camp, a second camp for the Residential Drug Abuse Program and the FCI make up the Federal Corrections Complex at Lompoc.

Lompoc is where I wanted and expected to go but the trip here and getting adjusted has curtailed my ability to write new blog posts but is a pretty good story so hopefully it is worth the wait. It all started on the morning of June 11th at around 5am when my cell door was opened and a C.O. said “Rose. Pack up. You’re leaving.” This was music to my ears. While the detention center at Dublin was fine and all, it was really boring and was starting to get on my nerves a bit. A month and 2 days sitting in teh same room with the same group of guys watching the same shows on TV (Sopranos at 10am and again at 4pm) gets pretty old. Finally getting to go to my designated facility and start to actually do my time was something I had been hoping for for a week or two. I packed up my stuff and was put into a holding cell with about 15 other guys. We waited for a blt and then we were put in handcuffs, waist chains, and leg trons and placed on an inconspicuous old bus. Plain white with an orange stripe down the side. You probably wouldn’t notice it if it weren’t for the government plates. You could probably see the bars on the windows through the tinted glass if you looked hard enough but it wasn’t obvious. The bus was actually quite nice considering other prisoner transports I had ridden in. For starters the seats were padded vs. the steel seats I was expecting. The windows had simple bars over them making it easy to see out vs. the sort of diamond shaped grates I’ve seen on other vans and busses. Most everyone got a seat alone and we were each given two bag lunches to eat on the road. Yes. It was very tricky to construct and eat a bologna sandwich in a pair of handcuffs that were locked to a chain wrapped around your waist. If you dropped anything, you can simply forget it. We each also received a styrofoam cup and there were two coolers of water in the back of the bus. Again, all shackled up on a moving bus made getting a drink of water tricky. There was also an open bathroom in the back of the bus. You could urinate if necessary but dropping a deuce was not only forbidden it was impossible given the cuffs and that. If you imagine your hands together not being able to extend further than about 5 inches out from your belly button, it won’t take you long to notice the logistical complexities involved in carrying out such an ambitious feat. It should be noted that we had no idea where, individually, we were headed. It was fairly well known that buses that left on Wednesdays alternated between heading north to facilities like Sheridan in Oregon, and south to facilities like Lompoc and Victorville. Since there were so many of us it was assumed we were headed to Victorville because it’s sort of like a hub for all California inmates. Going in or coming out of California usually involves a hold over in Victorville. It was also known that on route to Victorville that we’d stop by Atwater which was the next closest facility. As for me, I could get dropped off in Atwater (they have a minimum security camp) or dropped off in Victorville (they have a camp as well) or hold over in Victorville to go to any other facility in the BOP.

One thing l have to mention before we roll on to Atwater was the bus driving crew. Wow. lt was like out of a really bad film, perhaps from the seventies or eighties. You know, when orangutans in Hollywood were all the rage (Any Which Way but Loose, BJ and the Bear, and that lot). So, the bus crew consists of 3 guys. One is a Lieutenant who is, apparently, running the show, and the two other guys are just bus drivers with sawed off shotguns (really). All three of them were overweight. The lieutenant was just a bit top heavy and bore a striking resemblance to Larry the Cable Guy (of “Git ‘er Dun” catch phrase fame). The other two guys looked like a fat version of the two guys from CHiPs (another 70s/80s TV show) but, again, carrying sawed off shotguns, with pistol grips I might add. The white guy didn’t really look like the dude from CHiPs, but more like a tubby Martin Mull, to put a finer point on it. The hispanic guy, however, was simply a fat ass Eric Estrada. The lieutenant didn’t talk much but the CHiPs fellas talked like you’d expect inmate transport bus drivers to talk. They were trashy and talked to inmates like they were stupid and worthless. What really kicked the whole thing into overdrive though was that all three of them smoked cheap ass cigars at every possible moment. Imagine, three fat cops chomping on shitty cigar butts with mirrored cop shades on. It was surreal. I should also point out that by cheap cigars I’m not talking about a lower end cigar you might happen across at your local tobacconist. Oh no. We’re talking about those fine blends you can only find on the shelf at your local Walgreens or Rite-Aid drugstore. It was nasty. OK…enough of those fools. We hit the road and it took about 2 hours to get to Atwater. Atwater is an unremarkable prison in an even less remarkable town or city of Atwater. They neglected to give us to nickel tour of either. We pulled into the prison, parked the bus, and waited about 30 minutes. After that, about 18 more guys came shuffling onto the bus. This made quarters a bit close but I still got my own seat. Must have been the mean mug I was laying on everyone who boarded the bus. They must have thought I’d rip their throat out even while I was waist shackled.

Again, we took to the highways for a 6 hour (yes, six hour) drive to Victorville which is also known by a more common name, Hell, using the parlance of our times. Victorville is a medium-high to high security penitentiary and let’s just say Michael Vick and Wesley Snipes aren’t the kind of people you’re gonna meet there. The hold overs are put into a housing unit of about 160 inmates of mixed security levels. Housing is 2 man cells with the exception of 2 small rooms at the end of the unit, each of which had 14 inmates in it. These communal units are for minimum security inmates and the occasional low security inmate and are considered better because you have more people to shoot the shit with and that the one bathroom you all share is down the hall a bit so you actually get to step outside of your “cell” and walk about 30 feet to take a leak or use the sink as opposed to having a bathroom in your cell. Granted, in your cell, 2 guys have one bathroom so there is never a line but if you’re cellie is going to drop a deuce, well, you get to share the funk. In our case you’ve got 28 guys trying to use the same bathroom, but a least you can escape the smell although you’ll have to wait in line to use it. Everything in life is a trade-off I suppose. Ok. So I’m in one of the communal rooms and I meet a few other guys who are also on the bus with me. I should note that at this point we have found out that we are headed to Lompoc from Victorville so at least that little mystery has been solved. The other things we learn are that the earliest we are leaving is on Monday which is 5 days out.

I’m not too worried because the living conditions seemed a lot like Santa Rita Jail except that Victorville was super clean whereas SRJ was just plain filthy…well, I was wrong. See, there are a couple of major differences between Victorville and Rita. One is that the showers are not inside the units. There are 8 showers in the common area of the housing unit. Now there are about 160 guys in the housing unit and all of you who sat in the front row of 4th grade math class already know that we’re talking about 20 guys per shower. At Rita we had showers in each communal room and 40 guys in a room or, duh, 40 guys per shower. At 15 minutes per shower that’s about 10 hours of showering per day out of a 24 hour day, no problem. Well here is the rub with Victorville. You’re locked down 23 hours a day. In the 1 hour you’re out, you have access to the showers. That’s 160 guys trying to take a shower at the same time. That’s 3 miutes per man per shower. I can’t even dry off and put on boxers in 3 minutes let alone take ‘em off and shower as well. The breakdown came down to the telephone. There were only 6 of them. Therefore, you make a choice. Stand in line for the phone or stand in line for the shower. You can’t do both. For some guys, this truly was an option. You see, if you are in a cell (remember, the communal rooms are too good places to be) you have your own sink so you can take a “birdbath” if you choose to wait on the phone. With 28 guys sharing the same sink and toilet, holding up the cue for your birdbath simply isn’t going to fly if others have “pressing business” if you catch my drift. You may be thinking “Ok. So you wait for your shower and take it. What’s the big deal?” And you’re right. Now, you’re not going to make it every time. You still might miss a shower but if you skip a day, you skip a day…you’re not going to get that funky. But wait, there’s even less…see, at Victorville, they lock you down for 48 straight hours over the weekend. Let me say that again. They lock you down for the entire weekend. Soooooo, if you’re in a cell, you’re birdbathing it over the weekend. Doable. If you’re in one of the prized communal cells, you flat out stink. Assuming you hit everything right, you’ll take your last shower on Friday around 11am and you won’t get another until Monday at 11am. One last thing, the food there sucks complete ass to boot.

Victorville is pure hell. I would not wish it upon my enemies.

Before I ship us out of Victorville, I think it needs to be mentioned that our unit was filled (about 80%….so maybe 130 or so) with Southsiders, a mexican gang. They were transfered there from another institution where they were involved in an “incident” with another mexican gang, the Northerners. I don’t want to sound like a wuss by saying “they put us in there with all these gangbangers,” but they put is in there with all these gangbangers. ‘Nuff said.

About 5 days after we arrived, on Monday June 16th at 4am I heard the sweet sound of “Rose. Pack up. You’re on the bus.” If there ever was a time that a Mormon missionary needed to stroll along to get me in their camp, they missed their golden opportunity right there. I was ripe for the picking. Me and my new friends we’re all grinning ear to ear, tired as hell, smelling like ass, absolutely giddy to be headed to a federal prison.

Victorville is pure hell.

As you would expect, the shackled up about 30 of us, and Larry and the CHiPs dudes picked us up on the bus and we started rolling on to Lompoc. The bus headed west until we hit the PCH and then north along the coast. There were lots of ooohhhs and aahhhhhs from guys on the bus as we rolled past the beaches and the breaking Pacific ocean. It was a beautiful morning and the coast line was really something to see. Actually, I
don’t know if it was any more beautiful than any other morning but after getting out of 5 days of Victorville we could have been on a bus driving through Hurricane Katrina and it would have been beautiful to me. One thing that I realized, however, is that there were a lot of guys on our bus that had been incarcerated for 5- 10- 15- years or more. Some of them were from middle America and had never seen the ocean first hand
in their lives. It was then that you start to realize how the simplest of things is so easily taken for granted in day to day life. I thought about that one for a long time and before I knew it, we were pulling into FCC Lompoc.

I’m going to wind this section of my blog post up now and the next one will be about Lompoc itself and what I’ve done in the first couple of weeks. Again, thanks for reading and I hope life is treating you all very well.