And, occasionally, uncivilized behavior. Lieutenant Parks and his colleagues have called up some highlights of security camera footage from the visiting room. On the monitor, we watch a man palm an apricot-sized packet of something illegal that his wife has just slipped him, and then reach behind his back and deep into the seat of his pants, all while playing a board game with his son.
Based on the boxiness of the monitor we are viewing, Avenal’s computer hardware does not appear to have been upgraded since the turn of the century. Budgets are lean. When I asked why the prison doesn’t install a Body Orifice Security Scanner (a high-tech imaging chair that relieves guards of the distasteful tedium of bend-over-and-spread), Parks laughed. There isn’t even money to reorder business cards. The prison was built for twenty-five hundred men, and now houses fifty-seven hundred. Everything, right down to the pink plastic flyswatter in Visiting Services, is broken or old or both. Meanwhile, the inmates are watching movies on smuggled smartphones.
The newer smartphones contain enough metal to set off the Avenal metal detectors, so they are hooped mainly by one inmate, a man with a hip replacement. His hip gains him a pass from the metal detector. “And we can’t X-ray him without a court order or someone from medical saying that it’s medically necessary,” says Parks. The man hoops two or three phones at a time. The yard price on a smartphone is $1,500. “That guy is making a pile of money.” Probably more than Lieutenant Gene Parks.
Three smartphones—or tobacco plugs—is a load far larger than the cup of water in Ahmed Shafik’s balloon study. Given what I’ve learned about the physiology of the human rectum, it must be a tremendous struggle to keep it all in.
“That’s something you can ask them yourself.” Parks has arranged an interview.
ASIDE FROM A basketball backboard (I changed that from hoop, as a courtesy to you), and a few chairs set in a receding slice of shade, Yard 4 is bare. With rocks, someone has spelled out “4-YARD” in the rubbly parched dirt beside the gate. I think of inuksuks, the signposts that Arctic travelers build by piling stone slabs. In prison, as in the Arctic, you express yourself with the little you have at hand.
My escort from the Avenal Public Information Office, Ed Borla, calls to a guard to open the gate. A few inmates glance over as we cross the prison yard, but most ignore us. I am really, I think to myself, getting old.
Like all the yards at Avenal, this one has a row of amenities, each identified with a hand-painted red block-letter sign: GYM, LIBRARY, LAUNDRY, COUNSELOR, CHAPEL. It’s like a tiny homegrown strip mall. I wait in one of the staff offices while Borla goes to find the man I’ll be interviewing. I ask the staffer whose office it is whether he knows what my inmate is in for. He types the number on his computer keyboard and then turns the monitor toward me. The cursor blinks calmly beneath the word MURDER, just like that, in capital letters.
Before I have time to process this interesting piece of new information, the prisoner arrives in the hallway outside. I will call him Rodriguez, because I agreed not to disclose his real surname. Borla points to an empty office across the hall. “You guys will be in there.” I glance down at my list of questions, which includes “Might hooping be a form of what the Journal of Homosexuality calls ‘masked anal manipulation’?”
I explain myself as best I can. Rodriguez doesn’t seem to find my line of inquiry to be freakish or surprising. As one of Parks’s colleagues said earlier, of hooping, “It’s a way of life.” Rodriguez begins at the beginning, twenty-some years ago, in San Quentin. He belonged to a gang, and a leader of that gang approached him with an assignment. “I was told, ‘Look, somebody is going to get stabbed in the—’”
I can’t make out his last few words. “. . . in the arm?”
Rodriguez suppresses a smile. The very thought of a gang leader ordering an arm injury. “In the yard.”
Rodriguez doesn’t project the personality that his rap sheet suggests. He is friendly, engaged. He looks you in the eyes. Smiles easily. Has beautiful teeth. You’d be happy to sit next to him on a long flight. You would never take him for a prisoner were it not for his pants, which say “PRISONER” in 200-point type down the length of one thigh. That’s kind of a giveaway.