August 24, 2008

Before I get into the meat of this entry, apologies are in order. I realize it’s been well over a month since my last post and that’s totally my bad. A number of contributing factors were involved,the primary being that when I mail my entries out I no longer have copies so I often forget what I have included and what I have not included in my posts. I’ve now solved this problem and so any further lapses in the timeliness of my posts is likely because I’m a lazy shit or I’ve been sent to the hole for doing something wrong. Now that we’ve put that behind us, on with the show.

When we last left our hero he had escaped the unadulterated hell that is ‘UsP Victorville and had just rolled into FCC Lompoc. First, a bit about the penitentiary itself. USP Lompoc was built back in the 50s as a military prison. Sometime after that it was changed over into a federal prison. The prison is very creepy and old looking from the outside. If you needed a movie set for “scary, musky, people probably get sexually violated every single day, federal prison” well Lompoc has your exterior shot down pat. Luckily, I had been told by an inmate on the bus in one of the Victorville holding cells that they don’t take people directly to camp. You have to go to receiving which is in the medium security prison (the old pen) so I did not shit a brick when we passed the camp and started pulling into the big house. Let me point out that there are 4 facilities at Lompoc. The old penitentiary is now classified as a federal correctional institution (FCI) and is a medium security facility. There is also a separate low security facility, and two camps. Camp South is a general minimum security camp and Camp North is the Residential Drug Abuse Program camp. Before I get into our little adventure in the pen, allow me to introduce you to JT. I met JT on the bus. We picked him up at Atwater where he was in the camp there. He was transferring to Lompoc and he and I commiserated in Victorville. JT is a big Italian guy that looks like he played linebacker in college. He has a thick New York accent and is in on a short white collar crime bid. He’s a really nice guy and we had as much fun as possible while enduring Victorville. It must be noted, however, that JT was a bit on edge this particular morning because he almost didn’t get on the bus. If you’ll recall I mentioned that about 30 of us were lined up with shit eating grins on our face at Victorville at around 4 in the morning after they had called us to get on the bus. We had left the housing unit we were in and walked over to discharge where we were put into a holding cell. When a CO transfers a group of inmates from one unit to another (and therefore to another co’s custody) they run down the list to make sure everyone is accounted for. They run the lists in alphabetical order and JT was like 4 or 5 people behind me. They are running down the list and they call my name, I head into the cell and find a seat on the floor on the other side of the cell from the door. There are already about 20 guys in there already (folks whose last names come before Rose, obviously) and so I’m sitting there, waiting for JT and still just feeling relieved that I’m getting the fuck out of dodge. About a minute later, they close the cell door. Ummmmm. Where the fuck is JT!?!!? I can already hear outside the two CO’s talking and JT pleading his case. The lady who was taking over our custody was saying that his name is not on the list, of course JT is saying it has to be as that’s how he ended up in the line in the first place.

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