1 Felony Count(s) of 784.045.1a2

9/14/2013

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The first question I was asked in jail was "What are you here for?" And I must have heard the same question a hundred times before my six months was up. I stopped answering it after the first day. Actually for perhaps the first time in my life I didn't feel the need to explain anything. There was no one there that I needed anything from. There was no one there that I felt the need to impress. I would be housed and fed and clothed regardless of who liked me or who I pissed off. It was very liberating. I chose to clam up. The only person I felt the need to communicate with was the nurse practitioner and that was only until I realized she wasn't listening to anything I had to say, so I stopped talking to her and just hid the pills that I didn't want to take which eventually got me in a world of trouble, but that's for a different blog.

Now this is not to say that I didn't talk at all, but I chose my confidantes carefully. One woman was a legal whiz and until I had figured out with my attorney what was going to happen to me I would ask questions of Dulcie. Caroline was friends with one of the guards and whenever I needed something from a guard I would go to her. Meghan and I both liked to do Sudoku. She would find all the hard puzzles, do them first in pencil, erase the answers and pass them along to me. Hey, it kept my brain from atrophying. Cheryl always had the best books which she shared generously with me and vice versa, plus if she had coffee and I didn't, I could always count on her for a spoonful.

Now Chip, she was my lifeline in jail. We played countless games of Scrabble and were together for most of each and every day. I talked about my personal life with Chip and she told me all about her life with Mitch in Belize. We were both artists. We laughed a lot together and we cried some too. Chip got out of jail a couple of months before me and I wrote to her when she'd left. When I got deported back to England we emailed each other on a regular basis. Chip, Mitch, Randy and I all lived together in Punta Gorda, Belize for three months just before I came to Mexico. It was interesting to see who she was outside of jail. She was much more flamboyant in her own environment. I enjoyed spending time with her. Chip died suddenly from a very short illness in Belize last December. I am glad I got to know her. I miss her a lot.
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NEW INMATES TO GOSSIP ABOUT

9/6/2013

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Key West Detention Center is the only jail that houses women in the Florida Keys. If you're arrested in the upper Keys or Marathon you will be kept in a holding cell until around midnight when the bus arrives to take you down to Key West making stops along the way to pick up more detainees. So when the bus gets into Key West there's sometimes a few women on board. If you happen to be awake when they get in at about 1:00am it's always interesting to see who's new. And, you can pretty much guess what they're in for just by looking at them.

All the really thin girls are in for using crack - almost. Sometimes an alcoholic is skin and bones, but you don't see that too often. Sometimes there's a healthy-looking crack user but not too often. They mostly always have long, stringy bleached hair. The crack addicts are in for possession or solicitation. The length of their stay in jail is dependent on how old they are, or how old they look. The older they are, the longer they've been in the game, the more times they've been arrested, the longer the sentence. Could be three months, six months or up to a year. Rarely do they go away to prison. Usually that's only for drug dealers.

The chronic alcoholics are plump, round but rarely obese. Most look tired and weathered. They often have a few bruises somewhere on their bodies. Their faces are red and their noses are bulbous. Alcoholics can be in jail for any number of reasons. In Key West the charge is often an open container charge. Now let me tell you that's a racket. I mean come on! Party Town Central and the boys in blue go around town and the beaches rounding up locals and tourists for drinking out of an open bottle or can and send them to jail. I suppose it makes revenue for the City. Everyone arrested for an open container pays a fine. The tourists bail out the next morning and the locals can stay anywhere from a week to a month. In Key West the open containers and the trespassers make up about 10 percent of the female inmate population.

The woman that comes in looking like the girl next door or your boss i.e. completely normal is the tourist who partied too much the night before, had a fight with her boyfriend in public and found herself in a blue uniform the next morning. She has a blotchy face from hours of crying and she looks scared to death. More often than not these poor things are bailed out before they make up their beds and you never even know their names.


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    Author

    I'm a transplanted Brit. living in Mexico painting and writing my way through life. I  live as warmly as possible.

    In 2011 I spent six months in Key West Detention Center and one more month in Glades Co. Detention Center awaiting deportation.

    One would think it would have been a nightmare and sometimes it was. Mostly it was boring. However, I read more good books than I've ever done. I drew and painted on a daily basis and often jail was downright hilarious. I also made a friend for life.

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