New Years revelry

You may think that an incarcerated person has no chance to party in any way for New Year's Eve. The guys around here would certainly surprise you. I've written before about the drugs that still find their way inside these walls. In preparation for the New Year's Eve festivities last night, several guys spent a week making hooch to go along with the weed. Drunk and high is a situation I want to stay way from, so I planned to spend the evening in my cell doing some reading.

Around nine o'clock Alan came into the cell saying, "These guys are getting stupid." The two of us made a prison pizza to share and had cocoa and cookies for dessert. Looking out of our cell door around eleven, we saw five guys stumbling around a table and yelling crazy stuff. Staying in our bunker on the second floor was a good idea.

Every now and then we would hear shouting, but it was never violent. The noise got louder and louder until midnight when one of the drunk stoners screamed, "Happy New Year!" and ran across the second floor throwing confetti. When he got to the ground floor he ran around, banging tables. He knocked out one of the frosted Plexiglas screens on the showers and kept going. Alan and I looked at each other and laughed with that "what an idiot" tone.

We didn't venture out of the cell until this morning after the chaos was cleared up and all the drunks were lying hungover in their cells. This was the most interesting New Year's I've had while incarcerated by far.

Drugs, anyone?

One thing that amazes me is how often the law is broken even within prison. I heard stories about cell phones being used for high-priced calls home but I think that's the only contraband that I haven't seen for myself. Everything else I've seen isn't even legal outside of prison.

At the first transfer unit I was at, there was a guy that overdosed on cocaine. He went into seizures on the floor and wasn't wheeled out for almost thirty minutes (a testament to TDC medical response - you do not want to get sick or injured here), then taken to a nearby unit for treatment. I assume the cocaine came through in a body cavity or traveled with him all the way from county jail.

The most common drug I've seen is marijuana. The first night I was in this dorm, three guys were smoking a joint in a shower stall. Many nights, when the fans come on, you can smell the scent of weed drifting from one of the other dorms. Most of the marijuana comes from visitation or guards that have been paid off.

Other drugs that come through include Zanac, crack cocaine, Ambien, Oxycontin, and Vicodin. Prison, as much as folks would like to believe otherwise, is not a place where addicts are separated from the drugs. It is only a place where it is a little more difficult or expensive to get them.