ARRESTING ANECDOTES

Dr. Alex Wilson has seen it all while tending to the inmates, er,
"guests" in a Manitoba jail

Provincial jail time, in Manitoba at least, is two years less a day;
this doesn't mean that some inmates have not served time at a federal
institution for more serious crimes. As a prison doctor, however, I
have been serving this community for 12 years.

Many of the prisoners are depressed and a suicide watch is sometimes
necessary. Every now and then, one succeeds in his attempt. Those who
kill themselves by hanging are known in prison jargon as "wind
chimes." I suppose you could call that gallows humour.

A corrections officer (i.e., guard) brought a couple of inmates to the
medical department because they had been behaving strangely. When I
saw them, they were obviously confused, had enlarged pupils,
complained of thirst and were flushed. It seemed clear that they had
been taking something, but they denied it. Nothing untoward was found
in their cells, and as they showed no signs of improvement over the
next couple of hours, they were sent to the local hospital. There, the
usual drug screen was negative, and they were treated symptomatically
with I.V. fluids to counter their dehydration. Later, another inmate
told me that they had been making tea out of the leaves of jimson
weed, which grew wild in the jail's grounds. The side-effects of this
plant-also known as stinkweed (Datura stramonium) are those of
belladonna, and those who have them are described as being red as a
beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat and mad as a hatter. The
hallucinations are so unpleasant that second-time users are rare.
Jimson weed was quickly eradicated from the prison grounds.

Some time ago, I arrived at the jail and asked what was new. "Well,"
said one of the nurses, "we do have goat-man." She went on to explain
that an inmate, after an argument with his wife, while drunk and to
spite her, had sex with her goat. He was a repeat offender and ended
up in the Sex Offenders unit, charged with bestiality.

A sense of humour is not common among the inmates, but one day I saw
an elderly man (who had been incarcerated many times before)
complaining of knee pain. I asked him if it bothered him much. He
replied, "Well, I can't jump over fences the way I used to."

Another, in his initial interview with the nurse, told her that he
screwed up because he tried to live up to his name. When she asked him
what he meant, he said, "Some people have names like Baker, Butler or
Gardner. My name is Robin Holmes."

A repeat offender saw me for a minor complaint, and I asked, "What are
you in for this time, Kevin-have you been shooting at people again?"

"No, doc," he said, "This time it's for stealing cars."

I said, "Is it worth it?"

He said, "I made enough out of selling the parts to buy a car of my
own-but that's all finished now."

"Why, did you crash it?"

"No" he said. "Someone stole it."

There was a riot at the jail about 10 years ago. As well as the fabric
of the institution being torched, sex offenders were targeted by the
rioters, and two of them had fingers cut off with an Xacto knife. I
could never understand why these particular appendages had been chosen.

As the inmates are largely young, fit males, the medical conditions
most common are alphabetical: acne, backaches and colds; drug-seeking,
eczema and fungal diseases; gonorrhea, hepatitis and irritating behaviour.

One drug-seeker came to ask for alprazolam. He said he had agoraphobia
and added, condescendingly, "That's fear of wide open spaces, you
know." I pointed out that in that case jail was the ideal place for
him. He didn't agree.

Getting high involves considerable ingenuity. Alcohol (of a sort) has
been made in green garbage bags out of ketchup, grapefruit and sugar.
Crack cocaine has been smuggled in and secreted in blobs of toothpaste
on doorframe tops, to defeat the drug-sniffing dogs. Since smoking was
banned, cigarettes have been made by soaking Nicorette gum in water
and separating off the nicotine layer. Tea bags are then soaked in
water and squeezed until the tea has been removed, and allowed to dry.
The reserved nicotine is poured onto the tea leaf "tobacco" and dried.
Pages from Bibles are used as rolling paper and the gum from envelopes
seals the cigarettes.

To light the cigarette, two batteries are used along with foil strips
from chocolate bars. The batteries are from radio Walkmans. The
batteries are placed side by side and attached to each other with
tape. One end is connected with the foil and the other with staples.
The staples are touched together and this is the heat source from
which the cigarettes are lit. It takes about eight hours to make one
cigarette, but what else do they have to do?

Many of the requests heard in the medical unit make you shake your
head. "I would like an STD checkup and a Pap test." Or, "My penis
hurts when I piss and when I'm done and go to shake it little drops of
blood comes out. So I think that I might have hepatitis C and I'm
afraid that I'll pass it on to someone in here or my old lady on the
outside."

It's interesting how the terms for a criminal have changed. They used
to be convicts, then prisoners, then inmates or felons; soon it will
be "clients" and no doubt in due course "guests." The only difference
between them and a hotel customer is that in the cell will be a notice
saying, "Check out in 2007."

It's all part of life's rich tapestry.