the army I went through a combat life saver school. That school was two weeks of watching gory videos and bandaging dummies. For an amputation, we tightened the tourniquet on the rubber dummy’s arm until the pretend bright red bleeding stopped. For a sucking chest wound, we taped plastic over the pretend hole on the rubber chest. To diagnose a lower lumbar fracture, we checked for a pretend priapism on the rubber crotch. We combat-saved our dummies over and over until the final exam when we had to partner up and give each other IVs, real human IVs. I got my partner on the first stick. He got me on the third.
That’s what I expected for the strip test: a real human experience.
We partnered up for the stripping and took turns playing the inmate, but did it dumbed-down, with our clothes on. We all passed and Gorilla said, “This is how I feel right now: proud. Take an extra twenty for lunch.” And I didn’t strip a person for real until at Rockview.
THIS is what gets inmates strip-searched: anything. Inmates working outside the jail cutting grass or picking up trash along the highway get stripped at the gate, out and in, no exceptions. Before and after inmates hug and kiss their visitors—no tongues allowed—they’re stripped and inspected, every inch. Court hearings, security investigations, lockups, shakedowns, hospital trips, cell searches, and threats on staff all have that one thing in common, too—the inmate gets naked, at least once. Gorilla said, “This is why we do all this: it prevents escape, it prevents contraband, it keeps the jail safe. Mostly.”
THIS is who brings in most contraband: staff. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a staff member breaks a rule, it’s to an inmate’s benefit. Rockview was locked down for three days when two mobile phones were found in a bathroom vent—all two thousand inmates had their cells and selves searched. The state police discovered that a night-shift guard was paying for the phone service. The jail fired him. Hidden with the phones was a pocket pussy in a dirty sock. And even though there’s no actual proof that the guard brought in the pocket pussy, we still called him the pimp: the pink plastic pimp.
THIS makes the stripping job harder: old guards. Not all guards made inmates take everything off. Basically, the longer a guard worked at the jail, the less of a chance he’d make them strip naked. Complacency, it’s called. Usually, guards were alone with the inmates, so guards could, if they wanted to, bypass steps. I didn’t, so sometimes I got a complainer. When I did, it ruined the flow. I had to stop and explain that yes, I was really going to look at his ass, and that no, I didn’t actually enjoy looking at his ass. Some inmates just complained to complain, which was fine. I know I would. I felt exposed during the strip test, bending over in my pants.
THIS is the worst strip-search scenario for guards: being videotaped. Certain situations, like after fights, require a permanent record of a strip search—to document damage or weapons. The required witnessing lieutenant always says things like “Have fun” and “Analyze everything,” to be funny. If you laugh, you look like a sadist on the tape. If you don’t laugh, you’ve got an attitude problem, according to the lieutenant. There’s no avoiding it, though: if you work at a jail long enough, and you’re a man in a man’s jail, you’ll be videotaped looking at another man’s penis.
THIS is where inmates get stripped: cells, bathrooms, the gym, the cages in the bucket, they all worked. But I stripped most guys in the Shack. It sat at the main gate. Inmate-built, the Shack had vinyl siding, a linoleum floor, small windows near the roof, a bench, a heater, and a nail in the wall for the strip-search logbook. The Shack was small, ten feet by five feet maybe, but you could get two guys going at once in there. Do it right and you had one guy naked at all times. There was rhythm to it: one strips, one dresses, you mark the logbook, you call out “next.”
THIS is how long it takes to get to the naked truth: nine steps.
THIS is step 1: order the inmate to undress. As he removes his clothes, inspect every article. Gloves on, feel every seam. Empty all pockets. Look for modifications, patches on the inside, openings in the collar, strings for hanging contraband down the legs. Unroll all cuffs.
“Made by Inmate Labor.” That’s what the tags say on both inmate and guard uniforms. Inmates get brown. Guards get black and gray. All are single-stitched for laughs. The crotches are the problem. They blow out after one year.
During a pat search on a cook leaving the chow hall, my hand hit something heavy and solid below his crotch. I asked what it was. He said, “What do you think it is? My junk.” I took him to the bathroom and ordered him to strip. He wouldn’t at first. But after five minutes of my promises that I wouldn’t write him up if he complied, and my threats that he’d get a trip to the bucket if he didn’t, I got him out of his pants. His boxers were cinched tight around his thighs and bulging. It wasn’t his junk making them bulge. It was sugar. Six pounds of it in baggies—I weighed it later. He said he needed it for his coffee.
THIS is step 2: order the inmate to hold his hands out in front of him, to spread his fingers, then to flip them over.
Every other inmate had a hand tattoo: a cross, a spider web, a teardrop, a scribbled 88 (a white supremacist thing. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. So 88 means HH, which means Heil Hitler). A poor man’s jailhouse tattoo gun is just a staple and the ink from a BIC pen. Most guys only have tattoos on their left hand. Which makes sense. The majority of jailhouse tattoos are self-inflicted, and about 90 percent of the world is righthanded.
THIS is step 3: order the inmate to open his mouth, to pull out his cheeks, then to lift his tongue. Have him remove his dentures or partials. Look up his nostrils at the same time you check his mouth.
Tardive dyskinesia is a rare side effect of the antischizophrenic drug Thorazine. People with it have involuntary and repetitive body movements, usually in their faces. One of the inmates, who always carried a Bible, had it. Every five minutes his mouth opened as wide as it could go and his tongue muscled out to his chin. His eyes squinted from the strain. He did it while talking, eating, and singing—he sang in the jail choir. I can guarantee that he never tried to smuggle anything in his mouth. But during a search, for appearances, I checked his mouth anyway. Skip it, and the stripping just became personal. Gorilla said, “This is how you treat every inmate: the same.”
THIS is step 4: order the inmate to turn his head to each side and bend his ears forward. Look in and behind each. A little piece of anything can be rolled up in toilet paper and pasted in any fold on the body like a spit wad.
A twenty-year-old inmate, in for five DUIs, had tingling sensations in his right ear for two weeks. He woke up one morning in severe pain. He went to the jail doctor. The doctor flushed a bug out of his ear, an earwig. After the flush, that inmate went by “Rat.” You know, because he was bugged.
THIS is step 5: order the inmate to run his fingers through his hair. Have him remove any wigs or toupees.
I’ve only seen one inmate with a toupee. An oldhead, and his hair hat was ten years older than me—I asked.
Another guy had a fist-sized, fleshy growth on the left side of his head. No hair on the lump, like it had been rubbed off. I stripped him after a concert in the gym. All three hundred inmates in attendance got stripped. Another keep-the-jail-safe rule. He wasn’t embarrassed about the lump. He called it his mood cyst. It turned red when he was mad.
THIS is step 6: order the inmate to lift his arms, visually inspect his armpits.
Not every inmate could afford deodorant from the jail commissary, so the poor ones—called indigent by the state—used the state-issued bars of soap instead. Crusty and yellow, that’s how the soap looked—their pits, too.
Jail jobs for inmates, like single-stitching uniforms, paid nineteen to seventy-nine
