Dude made it into my newspaper the other day in what I consider to be the hard way. Offed himself in prison. And my only connection with that is that I once did a year in the same joint he died in. And I can't say as I blame him really. Not a name I recognize (oddly) but a U.S. soldier type who got convicted for raping a girl (Afghanistan, Iran?, they now run together for me) and then shot up her family. I'm not really knowing how much time he would actually have done, but he died in the federal prison in Black Canyon City, a little out past the outskirts of Phoenix. And then I started to think about how he might have gotten there.
FCI Phoenix has three "units", a womans camp, the level five part (meaning very high security) where I and most of the folks who pass through their rested our heads at night, and the next door, but a world apart place, that we "affectionately" called "The Cheese Factory". Why not Leavenworth, Kansas, in the military side over there?
Well, I know that he didn't go to Leavenworth, so I'm thinking security risk. To him, and not the prison. This ain't Hollywood. And the Phoenix women didn't get him. So now I'm wondering about The Cheese factory ("Rat House", or whatever you want to call it). It ain't a great place from all I heard, but give up some heavy weights and at least you stay alive. God, I guess that murder over there can get you dead over here. Somehow.
And next I had a flash of nostalgia that I thought I'd share (neither here nor there, really, just a Saturday night story.)
At a Level 5, we had the cables strung over the top of how many acres were there, "Helicopter Barriers" by name. Just to give the reader a flavor for the level of security precautions (I mean, for comparison, some of the federal prisons don't even have fences.) And the prison factory at that place made cables and connectors for the U.S. Air Force. Idle hands and idle minds, I guess.
And the two "stars" of this story were long time hands in there, with the one guy being the clerk for his supervisor/production line. All kinds of clerical duties in prison factories, the same as all others. Nothing moves without the proper paperwork. So the proper paperwork was created to send one particular piece of electronic testing equipment out for repair/recalibration. Also, of course for the return journey.
Did the family on the outside do a dummy company? Did one of them get hired on at just the right place? Needless to say, there are some questions in a situation like this that the answers to are just never going to come out in public. And why did the back gate guards not do, like, mandatory "due diligence" on that particular arriving piece of freight?
On the other hand, dudes were not getting out of there normally for a very, very long time. Sometimes, I think, a body bag ends up being at least as good as the alternative. And body bag it was!
Guns got in the prison. Guns got in the factory. Guns got out of the freight package. Guns moved at least enough inside for them and the guys shot dead carrying them to get into the no mans land between the two perimeter fences.
Thankfully, I missed the killings. I was luck enough to even miss the noise of it. We went on lockdown for a few days. They left the place the hard way. And I've never spent just a whole shitload of time trying to figure out exactly how they got even that far, or exactly what they might really have expected.
But there it is!