The Pen Years

Hey everyone. The following post is the first two pages of my dads journal about his time spent as a deputy in the world of law enforcement; it's pretty much word for word what he wrote. It's a bit short because I want to have a lot of these posts and there isn't a ton of material right now (20 pages or so). I plan on interviewing him and getting some more good stories for everyone to read; the material he has right now is absolutely hilarious in my opinion, so I hope you enjoy it!


The Pen Years

I spent 25 and a half years in Corrections. Until this day, I do not understand why they call it Corrections, because a very high percentage of those assholes are never corrected.

It was not a very rewarding career, but the money was OK and the pension is good... it beats the hell out of working.

Most of the first two years of my career were not spent at the main jail, but at an overflow facility which was in operation at the County Penitentiary. I worked mostly midnight shifts, and I did a lot of overtime on the day shift. I tired to get along with everyone on both sides of the bars, but sometimes it was difficult. I will try to remember a lot of the humorous things that happened in my career and share them with you here.

I got along pretty well with one of the criminals that worked as a trustee in the "Chow Hall" which is what the Cafeteria is referred to in my line of work. He came up to me one morning and said, "Hey, Dep... you don't drink the coffee here do you?" I told him No, I bring my own. He responded with "Good, because I piss in it." After explaining to him that most of the inmates liked the coffee, he said that he wondered in there was a future in it. I don't think urine flavored coffee would be a big seller.

I remembered the coffee encounter later on and asked one of the inmates if he liked a little wang in his coffee. He replied with No, I'm not Chinese.

We had inmates that could not be marched to the Chow Hall, so we fed them on the block (they were called F.O.Bs, as opposed to S.O.Bs, but that would work too). One morning, the deputies were all picking up the trays on their respective blocks. One of the deputies brought his trays down and said, "Hey, I didn't know they had sausage today." I told him they didn't. He showed us a tray and said, "Well what's this then?" An inmate had dropped a sausage sized loaf on the tray for my fellow Deputy to collect. I wonder if the culprit was Italian...

We figured out who the inmate was and dropped the turd in a small garbage can in front of his cell, just out of his reach.

They had a bakery out at the old Pen where they made donuts, rolls and other baked goods. One morning an inmate bit into a roll and found a cigarette butt. He asked me if I had a light; looking back, I think he might have had a smoking problem.

I worked the young men's block for a while. I wrote one inmate up three time in one week for exposing himself out the window to the females in the Rec Yard. He said he was trying to set up dates for when he got out. Another inmate showed me a legal document with his charges. One of them was statutory rape. He said, "I didn't do nothing to no statue." Maybe the pigeons wouldn't let him.