This was going to be what I posted about yesterday and then it wasn't. Now it looks like something of an afterthought, but it's still interesting to me so it's going to interest you too, dammit. Ok, or not.
So a thing about the Manhattan Detention Center, "The Tombs" to its friends, is that if you go there after work because you are a lazy nogoodnik and put it off all day, you can end up waiting in a creepy enclosed area as they fetch your client, daydreaming about how you would get out if there were a blackout. Oh, only me? Ok. As usual. This happens to me in spaces with big clanging doors (or in the case of The Tombs, lots of sliding doors. It's like Bartlett Sher designed the damn thing. Opera joke. Sorry.)
The other thing I do, perhaps to distract myself from the ol' neurotic fantasies, is read things on the wall if such there be. And last night I read this thing about the property that can accompany you from MDC (a county jail) to state facilities upstate if that particular luck is yours. "ONLY the following," says this sheet, and here's what:
1) Books
-Legal
-Religious
2) Religious articles
-Beads
-Kufi, yarmulke
-Religious medals on chains
-Prayer robe and guthra
-Prayer rug
-talit
-talit katan
-tefilin
3) Jewelry
-Watches
-Wedding bands
4) Legal Paperwork
5) Clothing
-Only the items worn when transported
No personal photos
No cigarettes
No toilet articles
No extra sneakers
Ok now I'm not completely sure why this struck me as quite so fraught, I say fraught with meaning. I'll venture this: my dad used to go out to a state prison and teach an English class, and a story he tells a lot is the one about watching new inmates get off the bus and seeing how terribly afraid they were at that moment. And I was just thinking how rotten it is, I guess, that you can't take a fucking photo of your husband/wife/partner/cat/cute niece who always says the funny thing/oldest friend who believes you'll be out of there soon/pony you had when you were a girl in Poland/house you grew up in/whatever helps you shut out realities such as peak oil, the cancelation of Friday Night Lights, and terms of incarceration.
But you can take your legal paperwork, which honestly won't do you much good if you're most people. (You'll take it to the law library and try to find things your attorney missed. You most likely won't.) And you can take your tefilin or your St. Christopher medallion for the happy reason that faith, rightly or wrongly invested, helps people survive the worst. And the not so happy reason that prisoners are easier to control if they think "this is bad, but at least I'm going to heaven later."
Also it's just interesting to see lists where someone tries to be exhaustive about examples of whatever so the kid in back can't raise his hand and say "yeah but what about my guthra?"
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2 comments:
The Tombs has the creepiest sculpture outside -- it looks like a whole bunch of tiny little cages, making up a column. I'm very disturbed by the artist who thought that would look good outside a jail.
And right inside the first clanging door is the framed quotation (Tolstoy? Dostoevskii? In my Slavist days we'd sometimes just say Tolstoevsky...) about judging a society by how it treats its prisoners. This has always struck me as a certain kind of chutzpah that this is there.
Oh I bet it's Dost, actually. I bet it's from From the House of the Dead.
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