Thursday, November 20, 2003

Empty shell of grinning evil The new Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center held an open house today.  This is a new complex right across the street from where I work.  DNR and MPCA employees were invited on a tour. We were shown all the various staging areas for booking prisoners.   I was reminded of the place where Paulie had been incarcerated last season on the Sopranos.  A huge crowded room with a bunch of chairs and a couple of telephones in the middle.  There were rooms for lawyers to meet with prisoners, some with Plexiglas separators and some without.  There was the 24 hour desk where people will be put in jail and bailed out again for the next 50 years.  There was the master control center that had the 40 screens for monitoring the entire jail at once.  There was the kitchen area where all food preparation will take place.  There were funny towel racks in the cells that are just impossible to hang yourself on.  And, finally, there was a court room of the type you see on max-x where somebody goes bananas and 15 burly corrections officers clobber them.  I plan on going to a lot of trials as the court is open to the public and I will be right across the street. The current jail is built into the bluffs of the Mississippi River.  If you walk over the Robert Street Bridge, you will run across women standing on the bridge waving or signing to their jailed lovers.  It is funny to contrast the vision statement for the old jail, built in the 80s: "Our goal was to provide a more humane environment with maximum natural light and views for inmates" With the technical details of the cells I saw today.  The narrow cell windows were cleverly covered with white plastic that let a little light in, but did not allow anyone to look out. "No more watching fireworks", as one guard said, "no more watching every celebration on Harriet Island"...just the perquisites that made our prison population balloon exponentially.  There was also a high-tech firing range built by the Minneapolis based Caswell International Corp that featured an air system that replaced the air every 2 minutes so that users would not be exposed to lead particles in the air, Hepa filters to protect the outside environment from the lead.  Ever wonder what happens to bullets at the other end of an indoor firing range?  In this one, the bullets go through a self-sealing rubber tarp and bury themselves in a massive pile of rubber chunks, then, every few months,  a special vacuum cleaner sucks up all the rubber chunks, leaving the bullets to be handled as hazardous waste.  They showed us the family visitation area, where instead of talking to prisoners through a sheet of Plexiglas, family members sit down and look at their loved ones through a video screen.  There was a children's play area in there that handily beat out Betsy's Back Porch coffee for the most depressing children's play area ever. 10:09:32 PM    comment []