Yesterday I had the pleasure of a scolding. Two days ago, on Day 16, on the advice of counsel, I placed a call to an office number regarding some bureaucratic requirement that was part of my sentence. Some sort of appointment for a meeting, ordered by the judge, with the phone number handed to me by counsel. Innocent, right?
I could not have been more wrong. The petty-clerk at this office phoned me back in a fit of rage.
"You aren't supposed to be making personal phone calls, are you!?!?!?!?"
"Well, I was told I could call the office about my sentence, which is what I did, under advice from counsel, but that is a true statement - 'no personal calls'. But anyway, what can I do for you?"
The notion that I could classify calls in all sorts of ways - personal, business, legal, emergency - was foreign to the enraged civil servant, whose simple mind seems comfortable in a black and white world of personal and non-personal calls. "Well you aren't supposed to talk to anyone but Jim! We'll call you for obligations so never call here again", he screamed before slamming down the phone.
For sport, I follow national politics. I dabble in some minimum knowledge about our state. But the county's bureaucratic organization is not clear to me (they don't give you an Org Chart in the Welcome to Jail Kit). Unfortunately I had upset the natural balance of things. I had bypassed Jim's authority by contacting someone above him and I was going to learn why that was bad. The hard way.
What occurred then, I did not learn until later. Mr. Furious Petty Clerk apparently called Jim, enraged that one of "Jim's guys" was contacting his holiness directly, rather than through Jim. He most likely reprimanded Jim for not minding his house. Jim became furious with me. Rather than simply picking up his phone and calling me, he crossed my name off the Blue Sheet and planned to keep me in prison that day (with no warning), and meet with me.
But that night, safely back in prison, watching TV in the 85 degree, humid day room, I decided to go to my cell early and call it a day. I missed the Blue Sheet, which was actually a blessing in disguise (since I didn't lie awake all night worrying about what the hell was wrong) and only learned I had been removed the next morning.
I had a lot of work planned for Day 17: out of town visitors, a working lunch, and a brainstorming session to lead. I scrambled to come up with workarounds, operating the jail house pay phone like a movie computer hacker, bouncing through our corporate voice mail system to leave messages in the appropriate mailboxes, asking others to cover for me in light of my ambiguous "crisis at home from which I can not get away." Brenda dove in and helped, fronting the costs for the lunch I had planned to buy my work comrades. I still had no idea why I was being kept at work, but the morning CO was nice enough to check Jim's schedule to ensure I would talk to him that day.
I kept making calls all morning - the prison's cut of the pay phone revenue probably covered a month's room and board - to the food delivery service, back to Brenda, then back into the voice mail system. My crisis was averted for work, but only due to the efforts of Brenda and my unknowing cohorts. The burden of missing a day of work is put upon the shoulders of others, not me. Unfair, of course, but prison is not about justice - it is about power, cruelty and suffering.
I finally saw Jim in the early afternoon. I had come prepared, with my entire prison folder, assuming I was meeting regarding my follow-on court-ordered probation.
"Why did you bring papers," he asked.
"I was not sure what you wanted to talk about so I wanted to be prepared."
"We're talking about your personal phone call, and you don't need any of that."
Jim, like the other petty civil servant, sees a black and white world. I tried to explain that this was an innocent mistake, I was following counsel's advice, and that a call regarding my sentence is not a personal phone call.
"You are only supposed to be making work calls, so yes it is," Jim countered, while fetching the 1990 rulebook from his piles of coffee and cigar-stained papers, plopping it in front of my face. The rulebook states not to make personal calls, but not 'do not make non-business calls, including calls about your case, even under advice of counsel, to comply with orders by a judge'. I see a distinction between those two things. I, however, am alone.
It was clear that this was not a time to teach Jim some basic philosophy of logic - that it could be simultaneously true that "all personal phone calls are non-business", and also, "not all non-business phone calls are personal" - if you entertain more than one classification set to the superset "phone calls".
My friends and family might say I am a stubborn mule, prone to arguing, always wanting to be right. True perhaps, but only when I get to play by the rules of logic, reason, and can appeal to the subtleties of the English language. This was not one of those cases.
So Jim went through 20 minutes of berating attacks, lecturing about how I am supposed to be kicked out of Work Release and have 90 days added to my sentence, and I replied with 20 minutes of apologies and appeals to mercy. It wasn't difficult to realize that Jim had been reprimanded himself - he became adamantly defensive when I apologized for "causing any trouble for him". He was making himself feel better by castigating me.
It is hard for me to explain how foreign this world is to me. For all its imperfections, the corporate world is a fairly polite and easy one to navigate. Generally, if you are pleasant, the people you work with are also pleasant. Those that are not pleasant, are usually fired. [I always wondered what happened to people who would get fired for disrespectful, unprofessional conduct. Some of them must find natural homes in the criminal justice bureaucracy.]
I can only contrast this to how I handle an issue when someone working for me makes a mistake - perhaps through haste, carelessness, or inattentiveness - but a mistake, not a malicious act. I explain the situation, explain we are going to work through it together, and then offer to help in any way to ensure it doesn't happen again. Documentation? Training? A mentor? Whatever we need to all feel comfortable for the future. Since everyone is trying to do their best, there's no reason to belittle someone for an error.
But in prison, that is not how things work. Imagine if in that example above, I instead threatened them to be fired, to have their life ruined, thrown out of their home, their children possibly taken, etc. I offered them no hope that they could recover from this mistake, that all was lost, and that there was no excuse for their error or misunderstanding. "The rules are the rules" I would repeat, and then quote them the punishment. I would go on like that for 20 minutes, watching them as they sit, let them practically beg for mercy, ask not to have those awful things happen.
Well, that is exactly how prison handles mistakes. If they revise the prison rulebook, they ought to include chapter headings. One could be "There Are No Mistakes in Prison, There Are Only Violations and Punishments."
Granted, I was emotionally fine during my meeting with Jim, but I can imagine this psychological abuse would get to many people. I played my role, throwing myself upon his mercy. Jim asked me what punishment I thought appropriate for my rule violation. Oh, how sweet to say "here's a thought - stop wasting my time with this stupid bullshit, douchebag", but I completed the role-playing without incident. Instead, I offered this gem: "I can't sit here and ask you for special treatment, or for the rules not to apply to me, I can only ask that you consider that I am not trying to be a troublemaker and then use your judgment as you see fit."
"We'll call today your penalty, but don't do it again."
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