Stories from the Big House

Monday, December 7, 2009

Despite a long history of petty theft, vandalism of state property, substance abuse, bar fights involving antagonizing bouncers or the NZ Navy, buying large quantities of narcotics, making and selling illegal weapons (or fetish toys if you aren't a cop) and sexual assault (You can't consent to Assault here, it doesn't matter if she asked you to flog her ass or not) and miscellaneous assorted stupidity; I never got caught. Never got sent up. I talked my way out of a bunch of things. I knew the right words to say, the right names to drop to make rent-a-cops forget they saw me. I knew how to convince the nice officers that I was a good kid was the wrong kind of friends.

But for a while I volunteered (when you get paid to go to a volunteer gig, it should tell you something about how fucked the environment is), at Juvie. My roommate was a teacher and he was doing some shit there. They needed some help with computer stuff, and I thought 'How bad can it be? Its only fuckin juvie'. I was wrong.

The first three or four days were pseudo-normal. The kids were rough and arrogant little fuckers - but I went to a pretty ghetto high school, it didn't seem that bad to me. The computers were all locked down in cages so the kids couldn't actually touch them to break or steal anything. The monitors were built into the desks and they had to use track balls instead of real mice - I thought it was ridiculous over kill. They were just fucking kids. Other staff told me a bunch of stories that I thought were just standard 'scare the new guy' stories. I was wrong. Then came Friday, about 11 o’clock I heard a scream from the next classroom, I recognized the voice. It was a teacher screaming. Not an angry scream either - it was an 'oh shit, somebody just slammed a pencil through my fucking hand and is twisting it right now' scream. I ran out the door and in my only vaguely sensible moment in the incident slammed the door behind me (that locks the doors so the kids can't run wild) - I should have called for security. I didn't. I charged into the room and saw a very large Maori kid (16, 6'5, 275lbs of steroid muscle) with a pencil stabbed through the teacher’s hand, grinding it around in circles widening the circle while the teacher screamed. He was in so much pain he couldn't even respond properly. He'd lost motor functions and pissed himself from the pain. He passed out while I was watching. The kid howled a fucked up victory call, pulling these demented faces (Its a Maori thing). I shouldn't have been in the room at all. Security should have been doing this shit. Even if I should have been intervening, I should have been putting him into a restraint hold. I certainly shouldn't have uppercut him hard enough dislocate his jaw and knock him onto his back, I probably should have then dropped a knee into his upper pelvic region (just above the balls, instant bladder release reaction and lots of pain, often better then a direct shot to the balls for someone who's had a long career of substance abuse) and then dislocated his shoulder putting him into a hold.

I should have been gang beaten by the rest of the class. I should have been fired. I should have been charged and I probably should have gone to jail. But juvie responds very well to kicking someone's ass. For the hour after you beat the shit out of someone - you're a fucking demi god. Nobody will say shit to you. Security arrived in what felt like an hour, but was probably like 10 - 15 minutes. I should have gone to jail - but fortunately for me - the kid was too stupid to stick to the events. He tried to convince the principal (Read Warden) that I had held him down and raped him in front of the class and beaten him with a weapon and all sorts of shit. His story changed every time he opened his mouth. Then warden was also a bitter old alcoholic and hated the fucking kids. He'd spent 35 years working with them and didn't believe a word they said. He tossed the complaint and it never saw a courtroom.

I got in a lot more trouble for leaving my classroom. I got back and the kids had trashed every monitor in the room. They had used shiv's or random shit to smash the monitors through the bars. They had kicked the cages in until they had trashed half the actual computers and none of them would confess and none of them knew who did it (naturally). I got chewed out for an hour, over that, and only the fact that I hadn't had proper security training before they dumped me in the class saved me from getting fired (which was bullshit, I totally knew not to leave my classroom and forgot, but I needed the extra cash).

About a week went by after that, where nothing normal happened, and then I came in on a Monday and noticed one of the kids I hadn't seen before who had a pretty fucking horrific looking injury. It had been patched up - but you could tell he'd had his face ripped open from just below his ear to the corner of his mouth. I asked one of the guards what had happened. Turned out that the kid was in for beating his mother and his stepfather half to death. His stepfather had been sexually abusing him when the kid snapped and in the middle of the night took a pick handle to the fuck, did the same to his mother. He was just in juvie until a spot in a corrective psyche opened up. But he was in juvie long enough to get initiated (gang raped), and predictably he didn't handle that well - he bit some guy's cock hard enough that it needed post event stitches  (I hear in real jail, they're smart enough to punch out your front teeth before orally raping you, kids aren't that bright). There was a pretty big fight after that, that resulted in donkey (I'd never thought to ask why the kid was nicknamed donkey before I heard this story) knocking the kid unconscious - and fucking his face hard enough to rip open his cheek, among other assorted injuries.

About a week after that I got an offer to help a friend out with some shit elsewhere that paid the same money and didn't have the same high stabbing risk. Only time in my life I've quit without giving notice.

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