Reading behind Bars

by Jill Grunenwald

  From that day on, anytime Tucker was visiting the library, Tug came and hung out with me. In the beginning, I’d hold on to the leash to make sure he didn’t wander over to the circulation desk and risk getting accidentally run over by the wheels of the chairs, but after a while even that became unnecessary. The majority of the time, Tug just curled up at my feet and slept.

  Which is what he was doing during Yard Day while Tucker played chess. I was so involved with watching the games, trying to pick up what minimal tips I could, that I completely lost track of time. It was only when Dutch walked in and motioned to the clock that I realized there was only about ten minutes left until the mid-morning break.

  The inmates were dining alfresco today, which meant any in-progress games could be left alone until they could pick them back up after lunch. They went back to their houses for count, which was the cue for the staff to get our hot dogs and chips. After count, the inmates made their way through the line and settled in clusters around the yard, dining and chatting. Peals of laughter rang out across the expanse of green.

  Once lunch was over, the inmates fanned out, resuming their activities from earlier. If, like the chess players who had been knocked out in one of the earlier rounds, they wanted to join a pickup game of basketball or baseball they could, or they could go down to the rec center where they could play ping-pong or checkers.

  The afternoon felt slower than the morning, the number of inmates dwindling down with each successive game. By now, the inmates who had been knocked out didn’t want to leave, they wanted to be there when a winner was crowned. I got the sense that at this stage in the game, the handful of inmates remaining were known around camp as the serious chess players. They were the grand masters and, like every game of chess, the winner of the tournament was going to come down to who saw far enough ahead to know which steps to take to position himself on top.

  Kinnear positioned his rook with a triumphant smile. “Check mate!”

  Stanfield, fingers pinched on top of his King, examined the board carefully. Then he tipped his King over. He held out his right hand over the board. “Good game.”

  Kinnear nodding, shaking his hand. “Good game, good game.”

  I glanced up at the clock above the door. 3:30 pm. We were done early. “Good job, guys,” I said. I wrote Kinnear in the final box in the middle of the tournament bracket. “I’ll turn this in, and they’ll be eventually handing out prizes. Well done, Kinnear.”

  The tournament over, the men all stood up and headed for the exit. I began boxing up the games of chess, carefully folding the board and counting the pieces to make sure all were accounted for.

  After, I stepped outside, closing the door of the chow hall behind me. A baseball game was happening on the diamond, but I remained under the awning, safe from the harsh sun. The yard was covered with men in varying shades of blue, enjoying the fresh air and momentary freedom. For me, Field Day had been a break from the drudgery of academics and homework and teachers. For the men here at the prison, Yard Day was a similar break, it allowed them to momentarily forget where they were. It was a day of games and fun and friendship and food, a break from the drudgery of corrections and officers and rules. This temporary break from reality. I spent five hours watching chess that day, and for those five hours, the men were able to pretend they were someplace else.

  I realize that advocates for harsher sentences may not agree with the sentiment of Yard Day. They may believe inmates shouldn’t be allowed to have a break from reality. They should be forced to confront their crimes day after day after day.

  I will allow them their opinion, but I vehemently disagree with it. At the same time, I’d also remind those that oppose any kind of flexibility or freedom in prison to remember that the men are still incarcerated. They are still paying their debt to society. A single day of hot dogs and ice cream doesn’t change that. They still have to be counted several times every single day and be told where to go and what time to sleep and what time to wake up and follow the rules of prison life.

  But they are still human beings with thoughts and feelings. Is it really so terrible to give them five hours every year where, at least for a short time, they can stay inside and play chess with friends?

  A few days later, I was coming home from a very long day of work. All I wanted to do was get upstairs and watch some mindless reality television.

  I tucked myself into the corner of the elevator and flipped open my phone, wanting to see if I had missed any text messages while at work.

  The doors slid open and a twentysomething African American man got on. He stood next to me and reached over to push the button for the fourth floor. Tucked under his right arm was a basketball, matched by the white sleeveless shirt and navy blue basketball shorts.

  At the time I didn’t really pay attention to basketball, although I was aware enough to know that just a few weeks prior, LeBron James had broken up with the city of Cleveland on national television in an ESPN special that came to be known as “The Decision.”

  My apartment had a healthy mix of both new and old residents. My next-door neighbor had been there since the place had opened a decade before and I myself would go on to live there for eight years. But the low price tag for downtown living attracted young urban professionals unable to afford the fancier rents closer to the center of the city. There was a constant influx of incoming renters and while there were only about sixty units in the entire building, it was hard to keep track of turnover so I was used to constantly seeing new faces in the elevator.

  I maintained my position, crouched in the corner, scrolling through texts. I didn’t notice the guy had been staring at me before he said something.

  “I know you,” he said slowly, looking me up and down.

  I turned to look at him. Scanning his dark face, I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, nodding. “I do. I know you.”

  He stood there, thinking, trying to place me.

  It was just the two of us in the elevator, the silence awkward as he flipped through his mental rolodex. “Did you go to school out in Lorain County?”

  “Nope.”

  I don’t do well at small talk, especially elevator small talk with strangers who were convinced they knew me when I was convinced they were imagining things. I slipped the phone into my purse and stared at the numbers above the elevator door, willing them to get to the fourth floor faster.

  That seemed to trigger something and he took a tiny step back. It was subtle, but still significant enough that I noticed out of the corner of my eye. “But you work in Lorain County.”

  This caught my attention. “I do.” I turned my gaze to him, scrutinizing him for some semblance of familiarity. Still nothing.

  His head bobbed, once, twice. “You’re a librarian.” His index finger jabbed in my direction as he said this. Wherever he knew me from, he had finally figured it out, although I was still in the dark.

  “I am.”

  “You work at the prison.”

  Ah. There it was. This was not the first time I had seen a formerly incarcerated individual that I had previously worked with outside after his release. But this was the first time I had ever interacted with a former inmate.

  Before I could respond though, the doors opened and we both looked into the hallway. A crowd was gathered, trying to enter the elevator, but my new neighbor walked towards them, arms outstretched like wings. He said something to his group of waiting friends, although I couldn’t hear over their chatter. A young woman with long, curly brown hair stood on her toes to get a better look at me over the wingspan of his arms.

  He pushed them out in the hallway, giving himself just enough room that the elevator doors would close behind him leaving me alone in the metal box.

  Apparently, they’d all just wait for the next one.

  Chapter 23

  Taking the Matter into Your Own Hands

  Rule violation: (14) Seductive or obscene acts, including
indecent exposure or masturbation; including, but not limited, to any word, action, gesture or other behavior that is sexual in nature and would be offensive to a reasonable person.

  —Ohio Admin. Code 5120-9-06

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement down the row of books. Please not another bat. Please not another bat. I shifted my head just enough and saw an inmate standing alone between the shelves, facing me.

  He stood, silent and resolute. As I took him in, starting at his head and moving down his frame, my eyes followed the line of his arm. His left hand, dark against the navy blue pants, was settled at the fly of his pants making the subtlest of movements.

  Through narrowed eyes I tried to decipher what I was seeing in front of me, analyzing the up and down movement of his hand. Is he . . . ?

  Noticing my gaze, there was a flurry of movement at his crotch while the inmate immediately turned 90 degrees to face the L section of Fiction. He plucked a book at random from the shelf right in front of him and hurriedly opened to the first page.

  That was weird.

  I turned back to the paperwork on my desk, shaking my head in an effort to shake the thoughts from my brain. See, because, I had this moment where I thought I saw the inmate masturbating. Just out in the open. While staring at me. But, that couldn’t have been what I saw, right? I mean, there’s no way an inmate would just stand there in the middle of the library book shelves and just jerk himself off right there where anyone could walk around the corner and see him. Hell, I could see him and I could make his life far more difficult than another inmate who had the unfortunate desire to want to read the next book in the Left Behind series.

  Even that whole incident with Brown over a year and a half ago made far more sense. Brown had least had the sense to cut holes in the interior pockets of his pants so he could do it without being caught. But this guy . . .

  I tried to focus on the form on my desk. It was September 2, which meant it was time to once again fill out my monthly statistics report. Every month I had to report back to Grace on how many books were checked out, how many hours the library was open that month, how many visitors I had in the library, that sort of thing. It was official documentation that got faxed down to Columbus and Grace could always be relied on to send mildly snarky follow-up emails to chase down any missing reports. Admittedly, I had, more than once, tried to blame technology: “Oh, gosh, Grace, that’s so weird, I know I faxed it but it must have gotten lost in the ether. Oh technology. Let me refax that over right away.”

  Grace knew as well as I did that this was the modern day equivalent of “the check is in the mail,” but as long as I refaxed it when I said I would, she would let it go.

  But as I flipped through August’s sign-in sheets to come up with a rough guestimate on how many inmates had visited the library over the past four weeks (knowing full well several had slipped in without signing in), I was once again distracted by movement out of the corner of my right eye.

  The first time I was 95 percent sure I had imagined any shenanigans in the crotch area. This time I was 95 percent sure that was absolutely what I was seeing. The fact that the inmate once again pulled the ol’ “Oh, HERE is the book I wanted to read” as a means of deflection sealed it for me. Still, this was a serious offense in regards to rule violations and I needed to be sure before making any kind of accusation.

  According to Ohio Administrative Code 5120-9-06, masturbation was not allowed within the walls of a prison. The Inmate Rules of Conduct outlined the sixty-one rule violations all persons incarcerated at Ohio facilities could be written up for. When I wrote a conduct report, it needed to be in response to one of the rule violations in the OAC, and the number of the violation needed to be on the report.

  Some rule violations were so frequent, I had the number memorized, such as twenty-one, Disobedience of a Direct Order. Others were rarely seen, at least by me, which is why I was always glad to have the filing cabinet of policies right next to my desk for those one-offs when I had to look the violation up.

  Each facility also instituted their own policies and procedures that only applied to inmates at the facility. OAC thought ahead, knowing there would be inmates who would try to argue that because a facility-specific rule was not included in the Inmate Rules of Conduct it didn’t count, but for those instances there was always #61: Any violation of any published institutional rules, regulations, or procedures.

  Because the rules are numbered and run down a list, when I initially began to familiarize myself with them, I assumed the numbers were applied in a way so as to suggest severity level, like a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst, and 10 being the best (or, well, least worst, I guess). In that way, it makes sense that Causing or attempting to cause the death of another is rule violation #1 while the aforementioned published rules is at the very bottom, #61. Any violation of any published institutional rules, regulations, or procedures is basically the correctional version of “Additional duties as assigned.”

  Yet, OAC 5120-9-06 states that the numbers do not indicate severity but, instead, are there as a way to itemize violations in a grouping system. So, assault and related acts were rule violations 1 through 7, threats 8 through 10, and so on.

  Sure. Okay.

  What makes it a little tricky is “sexual misconduct” makes up rules 11 through 14. Maybe it is just a grouping system and the numbers don’t mean much beyond that, but some order had to be applied when they put the list of rule violations together, right? Because, honestly, I have a hard time looking at a list that has CAUSING OR ATTEMPTING TO CAUSE THE DEATH OF ANOTHER at the top spot and not believe there is some ethical or moral reasoning behind the order of the rule violations. That’s pretty much the worst thing you can do, right? Kill (or attempt) to kill another human being. Across time, cultures, religious factions, we may disagree on most things but that is one thing we can all usually agree on.

  Even then, even if I were to believe the numbers are applied without thought to severity the groupings themselves must be in some order, correct?

  My point to all of this is that having masturbation at #14 shows just how serious the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction took sexual impropriety among the men in its charge.

  By now I had effectively given up on finishing the monthly report that day, and Grace was just going to have to deal with it. But I still turned my gaze and focus back to the form, because it was the only thing in front of me that provided any means of distraction.

  Thankfully, four years of marching band wherein I had to be able to march downfield without running into either flautist to the left or right of me, while also maintaining the very straight line across the entire back row of the three hundred-person band, provided me with superb peripheral vision. This meant that from his vantage point in the stacks, the inmate probably thought I had turned my attention, and gaze, back to whatever was on my desk. In reality, however, I watching him out with just the slightest tilt of my head.

  Watching and waiting.

  Once assured that I wasn’t looking at him, he put the book back on the shelf and shifted his body back in my direction. And the activity at the fly of his pants began again.

  Fuck.

  I picked up the phone and held it low, putting it up against my ear closest to the window and furthest from the inmate. I tilted my head to hide the receiver. He was new, and I had no idea who he was, and if he left I had no way of finding him again unless I got lucky, or unlucky as it were, and he decided to return to the scene of the crime and take another whack. I had to keep this call on the down low.

  “Fordham here.”

  “Heyyyyyyyy,” I whispered. “Can you come over here real quick?”

  “What is it?” he asked. Fordham wasn’t known for being one of the fastest moving officers. Those that were assigned to Education fell into two camps. There were the ones who approached the job as if they had the same security risk as in the houses, and always responded quickly to my calls, and were consiste
nt and timely in their hourly rounds to the library.

  Then there were the ones who saw Education as an opportunity to spend eight hours sitting at a desk in a relatively quiet environment with little interaction with the inmates, who were always in class. Those COs would always come when I called, although it usually took some finagling on my part to convince them, and their so called “hourly” rounds were sporadic at best. They’d mosey on over when they felt like it, and because so few people visited the library or signed the log, they could easily just match the time from their last visit to make it appear as though they were more accurate in their time management skills.

  Fordham fell into the latter category.

  “Uh . . . Can you just come over? I’ll explain when you’re here.”

  With a heavy, reluctant sigh, he hung up the phone.

  The inmate, realizing I was on the phone, quickly hurried over to the exit. “I gotta, uh, go to, um—”

  I smiled and held up my index finger. “Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind just waiting right there for one teeny tiny second, that would be great, thanks.”

  He might not be great at keeping it in his pants, but he was good at following orders.

  After what felt like forever, Fordham’s figure appeared in the window as he made the very short walk from Education to the library. When he opened the door and came in, it was like watching molasses move.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t doing nothing!” the inmate cried. His naturally dark face had gone ashen.

  Up until that moment, I don’t think Fordham had even noticed the inmate standing there, let alone thought he had anything to do with my call. Now, I watched as Fordham’s entire demeanor changed. He raised his body up straight like a marionette doll whose strings had been pulled taut. Taking a short sidestep to the left, he positioned himself between the inmate and the exit.

  “Oh, really?” Fordham asked. “And what didn’t you do?”