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.
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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