Wednesday 3/24/04

I won't soon forget this day. The first trouble that I pulled up was at the Limestone prison. Abernathy sent Fogg with me because he knew his way around the infermery where we were going. Part of the ordeal was funny, part of it was extremly sad. The gaurd stopped me at the gaurd shack half way to the prison on the prison drive and told me that the other guy was already at the prison. Joe told me that he had asked if he had a gun. He didn't ask me. When we went to the desk the guard there asked for the stuff in our pockets like keys and knives. He told us to remind him that he had put the stuff in a bag. I said ok, you put the stuff in a bag. He thought that was funny. On the way to the infermery Joe noticed that there was a big baseball game going on. I said that must be the field of dreams, we laughed and Joe said, "yeah, build it and they will come."

We then went into the infermery. In the lobby was quite a few prisoners just sitting around. On into the infermey was bunches of prisoners. The scary part about this was that I knew that probably a big part of them had AIDS. When we went through the back part to go outside to the equiptment room there was a prisoner in a chair that had those places on him of an advanced aids patient. I have to admit that I was quite nervous in this place and felt sorry not only for those patients but more so for the people who had to work in there. The trouble was a ground in the station wire to Mr. Dobbs office. It was a hard ring ground, so I reversed the line to give him service and we found out that they had a inmate named Peppers who ran wire and worked on electronics for them. Joe told Mr. Dobbs that if they would get him to run a new wire he would come back to hook it up. The gaurd said that Peppers was in there on a life sentence for rape, a life sentence that normally would be up for parole after 20 years but they probably would keep him for what he knew how to do.

Joe asked the gaurd about all the prisoners in the lobby as we were leaving and he said that most of them were in there to protect them from other prisoners because in there one could get killed over a pack of cigarettes. Man, what a awful place.