Yet I cannot convey to you here the bitter coldness of these faces, the shoulders wrought with tension, the limited, distrustful and frozen stare from face to face. There is a sad hierarchy here, a hateful division among indictments. It’s almost fascinating to watch the pecking order in jail. Though I hear prison is a far worse, -far worse. Odds are with my charges I won’t survive prison. I keep to myself here, saving a few exceptions just to have minimal contact to humanize it. I have had conversations at length, however, but in the back of jailed mind your case and the fear set an unbreakable bass that constantly thumps throughout your thoughts. Almost every other conversation I hear is about their cases, about dates and sentences and sanctions, about plea deals and nervous speculation seeking assurance. And I don’t blame them.

At “lunch” about a week –a century- ago, I was playing a game of spades with three inmates. A short and intense Mexican had been processed in, classified and released into general population for out-time, the three times a day besides meds when they throw the locks on the cells for an hour or an hour and a half, depending on the pod deputy. The Mexican is young and short, resembling a boxer, like a bantam weight, the same as a lot of short Mexicans do in jumpsuits for some reason. He tossed a newspaper to the guy next me, whose were broken and rotted and when exposed reminded me of swamp trees stemmed from abscessed water, dying without knowing about it. And he smiled while he read the paper, a photo and article about the Mexican who had been flying on speed and whiskey, driving behind a friend and factory co-worker who had owed him money. A thirteen year old boy next to him sprang from the car at a red light holding a baseball bat, ran to the guy’s car in front of them, pulled him out and beat him until the little Mexican walked up and plunged a knife into the top of the beaten man’s head, to the top of the handle, then broke the knife off. I glanced at him then back to the article, which said that his age was nineteen.