Last week I was arrested and spent 24 hours in jail for driving with a license I didn’t even realize was suspended. I spent a majority of that time in the general population of the women’s wing of the Orleans Parish Prison in a cozy bright orange jump suit with about 90 other women. It was the most surreal experience of my life.
Having never been arrested before I wasn’t sure what to expect. At the time I vacillated between righteous anger, terror and inexplicable amusement. Now that I’ve had time to reflect I’ve come to the realization that I feel let down by The System. It snatched me up out of my happy obscurity and forced me to dance with it, and I was not fully satisfied with my experience.
The following are a just a few of my grievances:
I was in prison
Me. I am not hard. I am not dangerous. I’m just a girl that goes to film school and spends most of her time wrapped up in her own head. I am a little (okay, kind of a lot) absentminded, hence the overdue traffic ticket that I assume is what got my license suspended in the first place (I’m still not sure). And I find the fact that time and effort and tax dollars were spent to lock someone like me up more than a little bit absurd.
I was in prison for bullshit
I always imagined that if I ever got locked up it would be for some, like, morally righteous act of civil disobedience or something, not on bullshit traffic charges. Protest rally gone horribly awry? Sure. House raided during a weed-fueled, Revolution-discussing salon? Absolutely. Improper lane change and driving with a suspended license? Fucking lame.
Pink handcuffs so tawdry
Now, I am not one of those feminists with a righteous aversion to pink. I enjoy pink. I enjoy it on cupcakes and shoes and the sewing kit I inherited from my grandmother. But on handcuffs at the women’s facility of the Orleans Parish Prison—that’s just tasteless and insulting.
Use of leg shackles a bit melodramatic
Before we could be transported from the prison to the courthouse we had to be cuffed and leg-shackled. Leg shackles? Seriously? I am a 5’2 soft little white girl in prison for the very first time on traffic charges. You are a huge, bulldog-looking prison guard with burly male backup. Where the hell am I running to? I just want to get through this as quickly and with as much of my sanity intact as possible. You’ve got to be out of your damn mind if you think I’m going anywhere other than where you tell me to. Excess, thy name is OPP.
On a side note: To distract from those fuckers grinding against my anklebones as I walked to and from the transport van and the courthouse I composed montage shots in my head of being transported upstate for a murder I didn’t commit but took the rap for in order to protect the man I loved to the Placebo cover of "Running Up That Hill", which flowed perfectly with the tempo we were walking. It made being shuffled around in an orange jump suit, pink handcuffs and leg shackles only slightly less humiliating.
Bologna. So much bologna
Bologna? Really? I know we’re inmates and we’re supposed to be punished and all, but I wouldn’t feed bologna to a dog. I swear to god that stuff is made of Vienna sausages, animal vomit and despair. I thought you were supposed to get, like, gruel in prison. At least gruel I could plop onto my plate with my big yellow spork and moosh around my mouth like I do pudding and oatmeal. With gruel I could pretend I was being held in some kind of off-world concentration camp by some evil Space Council or the robot overlords. All I could do with fucking bologna was trade it for cigarettes.
No souvenirs allowed
It is one of the great travesties of my time in the slammer that I was not allowed to keep my ID bracelet when I was released. I asked the woman at the release window, and she was not amused. She didn’t even look at me as she snipped it off, informed me that no I could not keep it and tossed it in what looked like a trashcan. That thick plastic bad boy had my mug shot on it! I could have used that for art or something but instead it’s going to rot in a landfill somewhere, completely not biodegrading. Such a waste.
I wasn’t allowed to take my big yellow spork or my mini toothbrush with one row of bristles that I was going to wrap in cellophane when I got home and burn into a souvenir prison shank either.
C’mon, Penal System. Get it together.