Prison is a very lonely place in general, as you might imagine.   Those inmates who are lucky enough to get visits every week or so seem to handle it a little bit better, but the trade-off is they also psychologically feel as if they should have more input and control into the lives of their family.  The rest of us are so cut off from those we care about, it is easier to accept that we have absolutely zero control over anything in the outside world.  So you lose either way, although most would prefer the visits I imagine.

For me, I think the thing I missed most was physical contact.  No hug, no kiss goodnight, no hand to hold, nobody to gently touch the back of your neck or rub your back.  Nobody I wanted to have touch me, anyway.  There were those who, regardless of their expressed sexual preference, would take comfort in other men secretly.  And there were others who did so and advertised the fact, albeit the rendezvous were still clandestine; sexual contact of any nature was a violation of prison rules.  But I wasn’t a part of any of that…so I was simply lonely.

As miserable as the general inmate population is generally, the Christmas holidays are twice as bad.   To begin with, there is the problem of holiday cards.  The prison chapel has a very small supply, from which a few inmates can get one or two cards each.  The rest of the population is left with the option of buying cards at the commissary.  However, there are two problems with that idea.  First, the only cards they sell are Christmas cards, so if you happen to be of a different religious persuasion you’re shit out of luck.  More importantly, the available quantity is rather small, so by the second or third day after they are out on sale they’re completely sold out…and since each inmate has a specified day of the week to shop at commissary, there is always a large segment of the population which is left with no cards to send (forgetting the fact that some inmates may not be able to afford the cards, or the stamps to mail them, or by the time they can afford them it’s too late).  Inevitably this causes a great deal of stress among the inmates.  There’s resentment towards inmates who managed to buy some (or who bought more than one); there’s also the fact that many inmates have multiple children by multiple women (or simply have a wife and a girlfriend) so they need more than one card.  In a few cases, these women know about each other, so even if an inmate CAN acquire enough cards, there’s a problem if the women realize they each received the same card.  I guess some of these women think the inmates get to shop at a prison Hallmark store, choosing the best card available, but that’s more than a little unrealistic.  Some inmates with artistic ability would make their own cards, or cards to sell to other inmates for a few meats each.  But limits on their supplies and their time kept that a small market indeed.  At my first prison I ordered a few cards for Heather months in advance, especially Halloween cards.  And at McKean I paid an inmate to draw Heather a one-page Happy Halloween poster.  But it was only because my requests were off-season that I was able to do that.  You can add to that the issue of inmates wanting to display the cards they received, which could cause arguments from their own bunk mates about space usage, or resentment from others who hadn’t gotten any in the mail.

Back to artistic ability, there was also the problem of gifts.  Unless you had people on the outside who could send your loved ones holiday gifts (unless you thought a box of q-tips or some used paperbacks would be appreciated), the only gifts available in prison were those you made yourself in ceramics.  First you had to be approved to participate…then you had to be able to afford the expensive supplies (and the postage to mail the project to the intended recipient)…and then you needed the time to make whatever project you were interested in.   Again, some inmates would supplement their cost by making and selling extra projects, but that strategy was complicated by the fact that you were not allowed to ship packages with ceramics in them if you were not registered in the ceramics program...and some overzealous CO in the mail room might realize that inmate A was shipping to inmate B’s home address.  So the process had to be a circuitous route, from the prison to a neutral third party, who would then ship it for you to the final recipient.  What a pain.  If there was room in the program an inmate could join ceramics to eliminate this problem, but then if he hadn’t purchased any supplies it was too obvious he hadn’t made the item in question himself.  Since prison rules dictate it is illegal for you to receive ANYTHING from ANY inmate (which eliminates the whole argument of “he gave that to me” when accused of stealing or gambling), the origin of any project was always important.

So cards are a pain, gifts are impossible…at least you can call on the phone.  But the phone is and always will be a major source of tension.  The lines are horrendous year-round,   but more so during the holiday season.  Part of this is because of the extra hour of phone time the BOP allots you for December.  They allow those extra minutes because they know how many phone calls inmates need to make, especially those with multiple families.  The problem is this means the lines are eternal all month long; each call can last up to 15 minutes, and it isn’t uncommon to find 8 or 10 inmates on line in front of you.  Fights about who was where in line, who missed their turn, and who suddenly “remembered” that their friend was behind them happen all too frequently.

Being prison, the phone system is rather unstable.  You come up to the phone area and ask “Who is last?”  If anybody knows who is last in line, you find that person and confirm there is nobody behind them, and then announce you are now last.  In theory that’s all it takes.  But in practice it can be much more complicated.  By prison rule, you don’t need to be there in person on line when you’re waiting, you just need to be nearby and make an appearance.  You can’t lay in your bunk, but if you need to use the bathroom or get something from your locker or make some coffee, that’s fine.  So the confusion arises when somebody somewhere in front of you disappears.  Let’s say it’s the guy who was immediately before you.  Now, do you know who was before HIM?  If not, your turn may come up and you’ll never know it.  And since a lot of inmates don’t know every body, you could be told you’re after “the tall guy who coughs a lot and lives on B-range.”  Who the hell is that?  You’d better figure it out.

Of course, the worst situation is to be told “Branch is last,” but you can’t find him.  So you announce you’re after him, and you stand there waiting.  Three guys get behind you.  Finally Branch appears, but when you tell him “hey, I’m after you” he tells you “no, because Demond is after me, and Lashawn is after him, and I think somebody is after him”  When or where this happened is always in question.  But if you think tou’re pissed off, what about the guys behind you who now discover they may be four more places back in line, when there’s only an hour to count time…at which point the phones get turned off for the night.  Or maybe it’s an earlier count, which means the phone line is likely to start reforming all over again when we are cleared to move (populated by those who live closest to the phones).  On a normal month the phone situation is only really bad during the first few days (when everyone is allotted new minutes), or just after payday (when broke inmates can make a few calls without inflicting their relatives with the insane collect-call charges).  But in December, it is one non-stop cluster fuck.

Adding to the fun we have inmates who wait two hours for their turn, get up to the phone, and find nobody home.  Or the line is busy.  Or their party misunderstands the electronic instructions and instead of accepting the call by pressing one, they press 2 to deny it, or press whatever the code is to block all future calls (my father used to panic and just hang up, so he could get Barbara to answer and push the buttons).  If you call once or twice that’s fine, but after you’ve dialed the phone unsuccessfully five or six times, if there is a long line behind you the rumbling starts.  “She ain’t home man, give it up.  Move along.”  Now the inmate is faced with a choice: move to the end of the line, or “fake talk” as if someone was there, and hope nobody notices that he starts redialing a few minutes later.  But if they do notice, there will be hell to pay.

So if the call never goes through, you often have a VERY pissed-off inmate, especially if he is calling at a semi-pre-arranged time.  Of course, there cannot be any true time arrangements, because you never know when your turn is going to come up, how long the line is, when the phones will be turned on, or if they are working at all!  If this is a rocky relationship to begin with, you get someone on the outside world all irritated because they were expecting the call an hour ago…or you get an inmate who thinks his girlfriend is cheating or has abandoned him because she’s not home when he thought he would be. 

Then what if the call DOES go through?  Well, the phones are in a very active part of the housing units, so there is plenty of noise…not to mention the ten or more inmates standing there waiting for their turn.  So it’s hard to hear.  And so many inmate relationships are strained, more so around the holidays than any other time, the odds of an argument on the phone rises dramatically.  If it gets too vulgar, the CO monitoring the phone call (they are ALL monitored and recorded, but you never know if someone is listening as they switch from one line to another) can disconnect it.  If the inmate or the person they are talking to makes a threat, or says something illegal, the call can be terminated and the inmate can be called to the front, possibly even thrown in the hole.  I remember one inmate had his six-year-old son say something about “I wish I could come there and bust you out, Daddy” and it was only the inmates quick, forceful reprimand of the child (and the luck to have a semi-understanding CO on duty) which kept him from getting locked up.

On the other hand, if the call goes well, the inmate is just as likely to be sad or depressed or crying.  Given the fact that most of these inmates are terrible at expressing emotion, and feel tears are a sign of weakness, all sorts of trouble can brew, depending on who is around, who says anything, and how self-conscious or insecure the inmate is.  I never had problems with that; I was willing to cry whenever I felt like it, and since I was regarded as some kind of nut-job-oddball-freak by most inmates that was tolerated.  And if an inmate tried to give me a hard time about it, my complete lack of anger at their ribbing killed the enjoyment for them.  Surprisingly though (to me anyway) my fair, honest, friendly, and respectful treatment of most of the population gave me some rather powerful friends, in all groups.  And the knowledge of those associations kept me from having too much trouble.  Guys knew I wouldn’t screw them over in the phone line or the laundry line, and that I didn’t let people cut behind me in chow line (and I didn’t cut myself)…so I wasn’t often a target for these holiday explosions. 

The other thing which made holidays so depressing was the fact that you couldn’t receive any gifts either.  Aside from money being deposited to your account (which you couldn’t do much with except buy some food or make phone calls without calling collect), the only thing people could send you were books.  Paperbacks could be sent from anywhere, but hardcover books had to come directly from the seller (such as Amazon).  Space limitations in your living area made receiving books a problem for some inmates, as they had no place to put them (or already had more than five, which was supposed to be the limit).  And a lot of inmates didn’t like to read anyway.  Magazine subscriptions made good gifts too for many inmates.  But that was about it.  Nothing else was possible.

The prison system had one small solution to this problem.  On an afternoon a day or two before Christmas, there would be the “holiday bag” distribution.  All the inmates would be called back to the housing units for a special count, and then we’d be released to move towards the chow hall.  You’d stand in a long line, and move slowly.  Eventually you’d make it to the normal food area, where you’d get a couple of homemade cookies that the Cooking Class had baked the night before, and a sealed plastic “gift bag” which contained a few Hershey’s Kisses of single candies, a bag of Famous Amos cookies, some crackers, and other miscellaneous treats.  This would be followed by a handshake from the Warden or Assistant Warden, and a “Happy holidays” greeting, with a look on their face as if they wished they could use hand sanitizer as soon as possible.  You then retreated back to your bunk, where inmates traded whatever they didn’t want or hoarded for later enjoyment (I was a hoarder; in particular I liked to hoard the cans of soda we’d get with our boxed meal on holidays…six months later I’d be the only guy with a can of root beer or grape soda in the entire prison).  That was it.  Happy holidays: a bag of expired cookies, candy, and chips.

And the worst part was you were actually happy to get it.  I mean, as shitty a gift as it was, it was still a gift, and it still commemorated the holidays in some fashion.  In a small  way, it made you feel like a human being for about 60 seconds.  And when that wore off, it could hurt just as badly as a punch in the stomach.