Fun with telling people you went to prison

After being in prison for over four years, this has gotten a little old...who am I kidding, THIS NEVER GETS OLD.

Some of my favorites:

Friend to my mom: "So how's your daughter?  I hear she graduated from library school!"

Mom: "Yeah, and now she's in prison."

Friend: "WHAT?!?!?"

He he he

Dad to a friend whose daughter is a geologist for a gold mining company: "Where did we go wrong?  Now your daughter's a gold-digger and mine's in prison."

On Ride the Rockies, climbing Wolf Creek Pass-

Cyclist: "There are worse places to be.  We could be in prison."

Me: "I hear that.  They let me out of prison for the week so I could do this!"

Random people that I meet-

People: "So, what do you do for a living?"

Me: "I'm a librarian."
People: "Oh that's so neat!  I love the library!  Which one do you work at?"

Me: "Prison."

To friends-

Friends: "Do you want to go out for dinner tonight?"

Me: "Yes, but I just got out of prison so I need to go home and change."

In the morning: "Ok, I'm off to prison!"

Quotable Quotes, Episode 2

Officers got jokes:
A male officer was looking at a magazine in the library office--*reading cover* "8 little things that mess up your skin...I know one thing that will mess up your skin--bobbing for french fries!"

Visitor: "Yes, is this where I go for visiting?"
Lobby Officer: "Not with THAT cleavage!"

"Unit 1, we are ready for your canine program in West Dining."
"Copy, releasing the hounds."

Urban fiction books are wildly popular in prison:
Patron: *Looking up True to the Game* "OHMIGOSH! I can't believe yous guys have those!  I love those books!  Do you know what they're about?  They're like, our lives--IN BOOKS!"

Patron: "Yeah, how do you spell urban?"
Me: "U-R-B-A-N" *thinks I know where this is going* "What are you looking for tonight?"
Patron: "HOOD BOOKS!!"

Cultural Diversity in the Library
* Two African American patrons discussing how to pronounce Janet Evanovich's name*
Patron 1: "I think it's JA'-nay."
Patron 2: "No, it's Jay-NET."

It's good to be the boss!

Wow, time flies when you are having fun!  It appears that I have been remiss in posting over the past YEAR so let me take a moment to catch you up.

First of all-the good news!  I became the boss of the library last June and since then my life has been crazy.  I have many more responsibilities, but it is so much more fun and I love going to work every day now.  It also helps that now I have a "normal" schedule with real weekends!  It's crazy!  Another thing to note for you potential prison librarians--if you like your weekends on Saturdays and Sundays, that's probably not going to happen right away, if at all.  Most of my colleagues have Wednesday/Thursday weekends.  This is thanks to the American Correctional Association requirement that offenders have library services seven days a week.  Which is great for them because it provides opportunities for positive use of leisure time, but not so good for the prison librarian's social life.

More good news-we are finally fully staffed in my library!  As previously discussed, bureaucracy is slow.  Extremely slow.  So slow, in fact, that when people decide that this job is just not for them it takes at least a year to get a new person in the position.  However, if someone is so uncomfortable in this environment, I would rather have them quit and deal with being short-staffed than have to walk them out because they were compromised by an offender.  BUT, my new minions are awesome, and I think that this team will be around for a long time.

Mixed news-bed reductions.  In our state, we have had a decrease in the amount of people being incarcerated (yay!) which means that we are reducing the population in our prison and also the number of staff.  This is good in theory, but it always seems like there are not enough blue staff to go around so when I need some back up to get two offenders out of the same bathroom because they are having sexy time and all I have are staff members who don't even carry pepper spray...that could get interesting.

But, as I like to tell my patrons and fellow staff members, we are nothing if not flexible here so we will make it work.  Prison librarianship is all about creative problem solving and going with the flow.  For example-today I was doing library deliveries to the patrons who are on Restricted Privileges, and I went to their place of residence and waited for the officer in the control center to open the door.  He looked at me funny after I was there for five minutes and then said "What are you doing?"  I replied, "I need to deliver to the RP's."  "Oh.  They don't live here anymore."  ?!?!?!?  Turns out they moved them all to a pod across the hallway.  Nobody tells me anything.

Quotable quotes, episode 1

Sometimes I overhear the funniest things at my work, and I just have to laugh, but it is impolite to laugh in peoples' faces, so I just save it up to put on this blog.

Some of my favorites:

Me: "Good evening, would you like to listen to some music tonight?"
Little Old Lady Patron with White Hair and a Cast on her Arm: "No, you don't have any Five Finger Death Punch."

Overheard-
"So I was telling her 'You're in a halfway house and I'm in prison.  This just isn't going to work.'"

Patron: "I need you to find me a good book.  I like books that are about people who've had hard lives."
Me: "Try this one, it's about a girl who got kicked out of her house because she is a lesbian."
Patron: "Are you giving me this book because I'm a lesbian?"
Me: "No, we don't judge here.  I'm giving you this book because it's about a girl who had a hard life and I think you would like it."
**10 minutes later**
Patron to her friend: "Yeah, the librarian gave me this book because I'm a LESBIAN!"
Me: "No, that is not why I gave you that book."
Patron: "Yeah, she gave me this book because it is a good book and she thinks I would like it."

I'm back in black...pants

Sometimes when you work in prison, you see certain patrons every day and then you don't see them for a while. Mainly, you go on with your life but sometimes you will hear from other library patrons or clerks: "OMG did you hear about So-and-So? She went to the hole because she beat up her roommate! There was blood everywhere!" And then you think to yourself "Hmm, never would have thought that the little gray-haired old lady would have had it in her" and then you learn to never be surprised in prison. And then after 60 days, you see that little old lady patron back in the library and everyone gives her a little bit of space, because you never know... Anyway, that anecdote (which is based on a real life situation with one of my most docile and friendly library clerks) is kind of like this blog. Sometimes I disappear for a while, which is not a good idea in the blogosphere, so I will do a better job of staying out of the hole so I can honor my commitment. :-) Today, let's talk about prison work attire. While going to library school, the only thing I ever heard about correctional librarianship was "Don't wear orange pants." Ok, who owns orange pants anyway, unless you are Ke$ha, or a member of LMFAO. When I began in prison, I was allowed to wear street clothes, with the caveat that you stay away from the colors that are worn in the prison. (Note for outsiders--orange pants are worn when a patron is on Restricted Privileges status, which means no phone, makeup, tennis shoes, library, etc.) Well one day, I was getting dressed and I thought "Oh, this sweater will look good with those pants! That will be my outfit today!" and I went on my merry way to work. Well, I arrived and the lobby officer kind of looked at me sideways but let me in the facility. I knew that I had made a huge mistake when I went out to get the book drop and a yard officer pulled me aside and said "Um, generally you don't want to wear that color in here in case there's a riot and you get shot." Oops. Ok, well why did they even let me in the door then?? But the icing on the cake was when a patron came up to me and said "OMG I LOVE YOUR SHIRT! I have one just like it..." *facepalm* Now, I have awesome black pants and a uniform shirt and the moral of this story is be careful what you wear to work when you are a prison librarian.

Prison Librarians: Getting paid to read porn since 1985

Greetings and apologies for not posting in a while! Sometimes prison life gets in the way and since one is not allowed to use work time or internet for personal pursuits it has been a while since I've had time to post. The topic for tonight's discussion is one that is very dear to every prison librarian's heart and that is the topic of pornography and censorship. In the prison library, pornography is a hot button issue. Generally, prison upper management is very conservative, and the do not believe that anything sexy should be allowed in the library. Because prison librarians are generally more liberal, we do not believe that it is up to us to decide how a person will react to materials in the library. Oftentimes this will lead to clashes, so if you are one who runs from confrontation, you may want to consider a different career path. To make matters even more complicated, at my prison I am required to sit on a committee that reviews incoming mail for a multitude of reasons, one of which is to keep sexually explicit material out of the facility. Now, you might think that this would be an easy task because as a librarian it is our job to resist censorship, but it is not as easy as it sounds. For starters, the rule for the committee is that if there are 5 or more pages of penetration, bodily fluids, etc. then the material is not allowed. Thus, an hour or more out of my every other Wednesday is spent counting the incidents of penetration and oral sex in that month's Hustler or Penthouse. If mail comes in for someone who has a sex offender reading restriction, my job then becomes to note each page of the letter that violates that restriction, so I read through multiple pages of horrible handwriting looking for such things as 304 (slang for a hoe/prostitute) or other sexy writings. Now, the rule in the library is different because in the library material must be "primarily devoted to" being sexually explicit before it is disallowed. And how does one determine if something is primarily devoted to being too sexy? Well, naturally one must read the entire work. Ha! One book that I reviewed contained multiple scenes of solo and multiple sex, sadism, masochism, penetration with animate and inanimate objects and bestiality with the family dog AND AN OCTOPUS. Yikes! Because the number of pages without sexually explicit material was 13 pages out of a 250 page book, it was placed on the not allowed list. Where it gets awkward is when everyone on the committee says something is too sexy to come into the facility and I let them know that there are things that are way more sexy on the shelves in the library. Ultimately, the point of this post is to let you know that if you have delicate sensibilities and are offended by sex, you may want to look at a different career path. :-) Until next time...

The two golden rules of prison

Perhaps I have been remiss in not posting this sooner, because the following tidbits are quintessential to success as a prison librarian. Follow these rules and you will never go wrong. The two things that you absolutely must remember are:

1.Don't have sex with offenders.
2. If it's wet and it's not yours, DON'T TOUCH IT

They don't need much explaining, and if you disagree with them you may not be prison librarian material. Until next time!