Six inmates, one reporter, and … 24 hours in the county jail

Editor's note: This is part one of a three-part series.

By Ethan Smith

Leader Staff

I walked out of the county jail last Thursday with my sanity intact and a 10-cent toothbrush in my back pocket — my only souvenir from my 24-hour stay in medium-security lock down.

My experience started a few weeks ago when I approached Sheriff Bill Barron with the idea of spending one or two days in the county jail, just to see what it was like, and write about the experience. We talked with jail administrator Ed Todd and got his approval, and from there, I walked into the county attorney's office and offered to sign my life away for the opportunity that hundreds of people spend tens of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees each year trying to avoid.

This was not an attempt to spy on the prisoners, or embarrass them, or try to get information from them, or identify illegal activities taking place in the jail. As luck would have it, the minimum security section was filled all week.

Which left medium security.

The county went to a three-tier system — minimum, medium, and maximum — 11 years ago after a man facing a misdemeanor DUI charge was killed by another prisoner with one murder already under his belt. In minimum, you have the bad check writers, the drunk drivers (first three offenses), and the misdemeanor assault cases, while in medium you have more serious felonies like drug dealing, assaults with weapons, and those who have been designated as habitual felony offenders. In maximum, you will have homicide and major drug suspects, more brutal assault suspects, and others, but the charge doesn't always dictate the level. Prisoners are categorized by a number of factors, including their likelihood to cause problems in jail, and three of them in my cell block had been in maximum security at one point or another.

My biggest concern was whether I would be locked up with anyone I had written extensively about, and if so, would that person be holding a grudge in the event that they found out who I was?

There was no way to answer those questions. Although I only write a column about once a month, which has my picture with it, prisoners get the Missoulian and Lake County Leader delivered to their cell with each new issue, daily and weekly.

Of course, I could have told them who I was upen entering the cell block, but I wanted to get the mosr realistic opportunity possible, and knowing a reporter is sitting there in the cell with you would have affected everyone's behavoir and the overall experience.

I wanted to see the real thing.

I would be spending my 24 hours with six guys. One was arrested in 2004 for violating his probation by testing positive for drugs — a charge he's contesting; one has been awaiting trial for felony DUI charges for more than a year; one had already been convicted for multiple felony charges and was awaiting trial for several more; and one was facing charges of possession of methamphetamine.

But the last name jumped out of the list. He was one of three suspects in the murders of Gerald Sirucek and Catherine Madplume, and he had been moved down to medium security because he was well behaved and not considered a threat to other inmates.

Pretending to be something you aren't — basically tricking other people, even prisoners, and then writing about it — raises a lot of ethics-in-journalism questions and so I knew that whatever happened, I didn't think it was fair to use their real names. It could also affect their pending court cases, as well.

After talking about it with the jail adminstrator and the sheriff, we figured the risk of identification was low, so we went ahead and made plans for me to be incarcerated last Wednesday afternoon.

The big day

I arrived at the jail in the early afternoon, and from there, Ed pulled in the detention officer on duty and gave him the scoop. They took my picture with a digital camera so they could show the officers on the next shift what I looked like, and with that, I was handed my prison-issue orange jumpsuit, flip flops, and plastic box filled with toiletries, a towel, sheets, a blanket, pillow case, and two stainless steel cups.

I was led into a locker room where I placed my normal clothes and shoes into a locker, and changed into my prison garb. The first sign that things were different on "the inside" is that male prisoners aren't allowed to wear underwear (this was one of the few things I knew going into the situation). I was told the reasoning is that they smuggle more contraband in if given the chance to wear underwear.

The idea that someone else had once worn my jumpsuit, sans skivvies, made me regret not writing an earlier editorial on how the county prison's laundry room is a vital cog in our society that deserves as much funding as it needs. Sometimes you just have to have faith in the system.

I was now ready to head to my cell. I knew ahead of time that the cellblock area I would be in — cellblock A — had two four-bunk cells and two two-bunk cells, along with the common area in the middle. Other than that, I had no idea what to expect.

And with that, the detention officer led me down the hallway, made me stand along the wall why he unlocked the cell, opened the door, and I went in.

The first few hours

The first thing I noticed was that everyone was asleep, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. Sleep, I would soon discover, is the best way to make time go by.

The detention officer woke up one of the prisoners in the two-cell bunk and told him he had a roommate. I wasn't really sure how I'd feel having some guy wake me up to tell me I was losing what little privacy I had, but my new roommate turned over, gave us a polite grunt of acknowledgment, and went back to sleep as I loaded my stuff onto the bed above his.

My cell mate had served more than a year already awaiting trial on a felony DUI charge, and I recognized him from an earlier court appearance last fall in which his attorney attempted to argue - unsuccessfully - that he should be transferred to the state prison or paroled, due to chronic health problems.

In addition to the box full of items, prisoners are given a mattress and pillow when they first go in. The mattress is about six and a half feet long, two feet wide, and only a couple inches deep with padding. Both the mattress and pillow are covered in vinyl and are designed to hold up year after year, while inmate comfort is a lower priority.

You realize this when you look around each cell. There's one stainless steel toilet attached to a sink per cell, which up to four inmates share at a time - no privacy wall, no toilet seat, and it's as dirty or clean as the last person who used it.

I put my stuff on the bed, and not feeling like setting everything up, went out into the common room and sat down. The common room contained two metal picnic tables with benches bolted into the floor, and had two plastic lawn chairs, a TV, some board games, that day's Missoulian, a Reader's Digest and another book lying about. I picked up the paper and began to read, trying to look like I had been through this before.

One of the prisoners came out of one of the four-bunk cells, and with his jumpsuit unbuttoned and rolled down to his waist, began to pace up and down behind me. I realized after a few minutes he was just trying to stretch his legs and get some exercise, but it was a little nerve-wracking to have a convicted felon, stripped to the waist, walking back and forth behind you.

I really had to fight the urge to turnaround, but I just sat there reading.

Over the next hour or two, some of the prisoners came out, as other prisoners in other cell blocks were being led past our door to the recreation area. You could hear them talking and playing ping pong in the room adjacent to ours. The far wall of my common area was actually just bars, which allows detention officers to pass items - magazines, medication, toilet paper, etc. - into the cell without the risk of actually unlocking the door and entering into the room.

"What's your name and what are you in for," one prisoner asked me.

OK, here we go, I thought to myself.

"Smith. DUI," I said, which was the crime we agreed was most plausible for me to be in for.

"Three?" he asked.

I held up four fingers, the number of DUIs that makes it a felony charge, which would (I hoped) help explain why I was in medium security instead of minimum.

"Hey, that's pretty funny. Your in for your fourth DUI, and your sharing a cell with a guy on his fourth DUI with the last name Smith. You're not from Texas are you?" he asked, in an apparent reference to my cell mate's home state.

"No," I said with a little grin. But he had opened a door, so I continued.

"What are you in for?" I asked.

"Two charges of felony assault with a weapon."

"Oh. What was the weapon?"

"A knife. But I didn't do it. They got the wrong guy."

"So how long have you been in?" I asked.

"Since the end of November," he said.

Uh oh. A little alarm went off in my head. My mind starting backtracking, and I remembered a little six-paragraph article I'd written about a knife fight in the Pablo area that weekend. I tried to remember the guy's name involved but I couldn't. Just one of those little crime blurbs I type up once in a while after I meet with the undersheriff every week. And I remembered returning to the office to an angry voicemail from the guy's wife, saying how they got the wrong guy and asking me, in effect, to retract the story. She didn't leave a telephone number for me to return her call.

And I realized that was the guy. I hadn't recognized the name on the list. My face didn't seem to register with him, though, and he settled down to watch TV and didn't give me another thought.

(We thought about having me go in under a fictitious name, but I scrapped the idea because it would have compounded the problem if one of the prisoner's had recognized me from having my face in the paper.)

Over the next few minutes, other prisoners came out of their cells and I realized our turn in the rec room was about to come. Having the chance to exercise and just stretch your legs is something you take for granted until you're locked up, but I realized it was a big part of their day, and something to really look forward to.

Shakedown

The detention officer opened our door, and the prisoners got up, ready to file into the rec room. But the prison staff had other ideas.

"OK guys, time for a shakedown," the detention officer said.

What followed was a string of profanity from one of the prisoners directed at detention supervisor Lonnie Erickson, who decides the frequency of the shakedowns. The detention officer who told us was simply the bearer of bad news.

As a prisoner, you are subjected to random searches of your personal effects and living area - "shakedowns" in prison parlance - as the detention officers try to locate potential weapons, prevent the production of alcoholic drinks (yes, you can do that with fruit, sugar and bread over a two-week period, I learned), and generally remind prisoners that they are being watched, night and day.

But shakedowns also involve more mundane items, like having too many magazines in your cell, homemade earplugs, food not sold in the commissary, and other minor infractions. According to my cell mates, our cell block was shook down about once a week, which they considered too much, hence the profanity.

When you are admitted, a sheet of rules is included in your plastic box, outlining all the potential violations and rules and regulations of the prison. Minor infractions include indecent exposure, faking an illness, refusing to work, loan-sharking your personal items, having pictures on the wall, using abusive language, storing excess food in your living area, and other items.

Major infractions include fighting, blackmail or extortion, engaging in sex acts or propositioning someone, participation in "kangaroo courts" or attempting to punish another inmate under pretense of law, attempting to bribe the detention officers, having drugs or weapons, and other more serious offenses.

One thing I learned pretty quickly is that the detention officers will treat you with as much respect as you treat them.

As we filed into the rec room, while our cells were being checked, the prisoners carried excess magazines, food and a few other items into the room so that they would not be throw away during the shakedown. Having excess food not sold in the commissary in your room after 9 p.m. is a violation of the rules, as is having more than two magazines, but taking them with you into the rec room while the shakedown is occurring apparently is an accepted practice. No attempt was made to conceal the food or magazines in the rec room.

During our rec time several of the prisoners worked out on the lone piece of workout equipment, a stationary device that allows you to do sit-ups, crunches, and other exercise that don't involve any free weights or moving parts.

While we were in the rec room, the detention officer locks himself in a caged area in the far corner. Some of the prisoners were teasing the detention officer about how he locked himself in, saying that another detention officer doesn't do that (if that's true, it's a violation of the Sheriff's department rules).

As they exercised, they sweated, and they would have to ask the officer for paper towels to wipe themselves off with. I understood now why half the prisoners in my cell block simply rolled their jumpsuit down to their waist all day. While laundry is done twice a week, and you can shower at any time, the commissary doesn't sell deodorant, so prisoners do their best to maintain some hygiene.

Having six guys share an enclosed area and bathroom facilities with no fresh air, and half of them working out each night in the cell, makes for a ripe environment, so everyone tries to do their part, so to speak.

Rec time is the only time you see the outside world, and it comes in the form of two-way glass located on one side of the courthouse. You can see the outside world, but you can't really smell any fresh air.

One of the prisoners asked the officer if he could open the vents, letting outside air in, and when the officer did, he was thanked several times by the prisoner. You could tell it meant a lot to them, because that was the closest you can come to fresh air.

Inside the rec room is a cabinet filled with hundreds of books, ranging from The Great Gatsby, to How to Overcome Cocaine Addiction in 30 Days, to John Grisham novels, to Harlequin romances, to Bibles geared toward alcoholics and drug addicts. The rules clearly state if your family donates a book it becomes property of the jail.

With rec time and the shakedown over, we filed back into our cell area and spent the next couple of hours watching TV and waiting for dinner.

Next week's article will cover my night in jail, including the role TV plays, what food we were served, and what the sleeping conditions are like.