Let me start by saying the smell is the worst. You can’t pin point what it is exactly. It hits the back of the throat, you taste it, you want to run away from it. You want air. Fresh air. You know what makes up the smell, but still, you can’t pin point it. All you can conclude is that what ever it is, its decades in the making.
When you drive up to FSP, you see the sign, you know you’re there but you can’t help but look around and wonder is this it? You expected something different. In a way you expect chaos. Some type of a warning or marker saying this is prison, you have arrived at your destination, asides from the layers of barbed/razor/electrical fences that is. Unless you’ve done something bad, have a relative in prison or like me, are in that one random class that decides to take a field trip there, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the majority of us have never seen a prison before. So when you step out of the car and hear nothing but quiet, see little people, you wonder is it just me or is this the eye of the storm? Perhaps it was the weather, as it was cloudy and just stopped raining but a bright and sunny day seemed misplaced and thunder with bright bolts of lightening, and slanted pellets of rain, too cliché. Our tour guide was certainly a character, not necessarily the funny kind, at least not funny in the traditional sense but that shall be discussed later.
FSP is solid concrete, solid concrete blocks with little windows. There are cages inside and out, all enclosed with two layers of electrical, censored fences, rows of razor wire in between and towers on each corner. If you do manage to escape with out being shot, or electrocuted it will sure hurt like hell as you have to walk through razors that will tear your skin like paper. As we walked through the first gate, marking our first step onto prison grounds I said “and now into the jaws of hell”. The person next to me gave a small laugh. Neither of us knew what to expect. One thing you notice right away before you walk inside are cages outside. Literal cages, and lots of them. None of them looking bigger than a king sized bed.
Once you walk in you go through security, that’s expected but you also see a model of the prison. It’s HUGE. 12000 inmates live inside, each with their own cell. When you get inside the prison hallways that’s when the smell begins. The door opens, a space big enough for one and when you step into the initial hallway you’re nose wrinkles a bit. You know it smells bad. Not bad enough to gag but bad enough to feel discomfort. The guide shows you through a window you can peek in the chapel, gym, visitation room, and you walk into the library. They have a lot of books; they all must be paperback as a hardback cover can turn into a weapon. Then he shows you a cellblock and this where things get a little… not necessarily perplexing but a little bell goes off in your head. The entire tour our guide talked endlessly about how well the prisoners are controlled. From how they maintain “peace”, how the entire prison is divided into blocks so that if something happens they can lock down certain areas to quarantine the issue, to how well the response time is, etc.… It was all praise. It’s all about control, who has the upper hand. Its all a mental game and I understand that. I understand how many of these inmates have to be controlled, as they are bad and will kill each other if left unwatched but if it’s so bad then why give tours? I asked that, and the response I was given essentially was that the prison has a good method of control. The way they work is effective, they have little to no escape attempts, the prisoners are kept in “line”, and they want to show this off. That last part wasn’t physically said but I can read between the lines. Now there are two things I learned with this trip. #1 the prison controls the inmates but also the visitors. Now I don’t mean control as in what you bring in but as in what they SHOW you, what you’re perception of the prison is when you walk out. By seeing all the reinforcements, all the control, the restrictions, they want you to leave thinking they do a service to the public. By the guide praising their work and effectiveness you leave the prison feeling better in a sense. Now please do not mistake anything I say here as a way of denouncing the methods of the prison or the acts of the inmates. I am taking no stance on this matter; I just want you to think for a second… Now Ill tell you what I mean by controlling the visitors i.e. the “tourists” in this sense. Before we walked into the cellblock two things happened. #1 the guide was told not to go into a certain wing because chemical agents were being used, I initially thought this meant cleaning, which was very naïve of me. #2 we were going to go into another block but didn’t, for reasons I do not know. This brings back the idea of control. The prison controls what we see by taking you into a pre-approved block. A block with less activity. Which makes sense, for safety reasons and all but still, its all to control you’re perception towards the prison. They allow you to visit so you can see for your own eyes the work of the county, state, and government, and show you specific things that will reinforce what they are telling you. This way you rely on the guide for protection, trust their information, and don’t think about questioning anything they say or do. This goes along the same lines as to why journalists are paired with soldiers out in the battlefield.
We walk into the first block. It’s quiet. It looks exactly like how they do on TV, just not as big or long. In here it smells worse. You’re lungs contract. You want fresh air. I hated it. You get used to it but not in the sense where you no longer smell it. You still do and you know you do, you just force yourself to not think about it as much. We walk into an empty cell, it looks like how they do on TV, there’s nothing new there so we continue. This block had some of the better-behaved inmates, as the cell had a window.
Next we went to death row. Here all the inmates were sleeping, except for two. The two at the end of the hall were writing. Death row inmates get crazy amounts of correspondence, usually pen pals against the death penalty, at least that’s what the guide said. You would think that in a place where people are waiting to find out when they are going to die, they would be doing more but really there is nothing to do. So they sleep. It passes time, and you don’t have to think. Those on death row have more privileges as they behave better, because there punishment is to die and for the most part that isn’t going to change. So they are allowed TVs, more belongings, and more time outside. When you see death row you get to talk to an inmate too. We talked to one that had been there for 25 years so far. He seemed charismatic, but then again he’s in there for a reason and charm may have helped him get there. A girl from the group asked him if he felt remorse. Another inmate laughed. Whether it’s because it most likely is a common question, that remorse is a fictional feeling to him, or it is something he does not feel, I do not know. Only me and a couple other students heard the laugh, it was quiet, and I wanted to ask why he did but I didn’t want to overstep. Whether there was an actual boundary or one I just made up to mask my cowardice, isn’t clear to me. I wasn’t necessarily afraid of what his answer would be but rather how he would answer it. Meanwhile the inmate we spoke with simply answered you can’t live in there for years and think about what you did constantly, it will drive you crazy. Among other answers to questions asked- he misses freedom the most, the feeling of grass under his feet and his prior profession: police officer. That was the last question asked and when he answered I felt the group get quiet, everyone was shocked. I don’t even think a student breathed. While in the block you can’t ask them anything relevant to their case, including how many people they killed, as their case is still open hence why they are still alive but after we left the guard told us he was in for raping and murdering a 12yr old girl.
After death row we went into one of the maximum-security blocks to see a cell for the baddest of the bad. This cell is deeper as it has two doors. The first door is solid, heavy steel with a tiny bulletproof window. This door is always open but in this block they were closed for the purposes of our visit, as if not feces mixed with urine would have been thrown at us along with catcalls and we would see other things that we could never unsee. You walk into the cell and there’s a tiny hallway of some sort. Then you see the traditional bars you see on TV but they are covered in the same thick screen the windows are. This impedes inmates from sticking objects through the bars. We all walk in; the guard jumps on a stained thin mattress if that’s what you want to call it and tells us about the cell. Says since at this point inmates cant see each other and its harder for them to talk to others in the block, they’ll talk through the air vents to the person above them. He also shows how they deal with an inmate “acting out”. If they are causing a disturbance and refuse to calm down even after a guard comes in telling them too they close the first door. The door closes with a loud. You feel the weight of it close you in. Then the lights are shut off and it gets pitch black. I have seen dark, but in this cell with the lights off you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. I try to keep myself calm by remembering I’m not alone and look around to see if I can at least see the outline of the bed, sink or toilet but get nothing. Here there are no dull lights from an alarm clock or hallways. Just pitch, quiet black, with the lull of the air vent spilling stale, regurgitated air, years old, being recycled through walls. Just at the right time the second guard who accompanied us through the cell block turned on the light, opens the door, and we couldn’t have been any happier to leave that cell. If this method doesn’t work guards will use chemical agents i.e. different levels of pepper spray. So I guess the initial wing the guard was told not to take us in was not being cleaned after all.
After this the tour is essentially over. The guide answers more questions as he guides you back the way you came. You really only see a small portion of the prison. You don’t really notice how BIG it is exactly. The death house, that’s what they call it, which is the execution room and where the inmate who is going to be executed stays until then was off limits for us as there is a man waiting to be executed. Unless there is a stay of execution or there has been one since my visit, suspending it, he will die Wednesday April 11th at 6pm. You can’t visit that area during a pending execution, perhaps it was for the better. You also don’t see the outside. The large cages I mentioned earlier are for the inmates yard time. There are 1200 cages each with a bar for pull-ups and that’s it. Now that I think about it I would have liked to see that but there were some prisoners out there when we left. So when all was done and the door to the outdoors was opened I was never so happy to breathe fresh air. The sun had come out, the stench of prison gone, and I thought what a stark difference there was between out here and in there. But that smell, I smelt it for the rest of the day. It stayed in my nose, my throat; I smelt it on my clothes. I wanted nothing more than to wash my clothes and body in a long hot shower, something those prisoners may never do again.