Jail visit & my rantings

Wow! I don't know if I'll ever be quite the same. Saturday morning, I went with my best friend to visit her son in a maximum security jail. I think it was the most frightening day of my life.

We came into a small entryway & had to wait for the guards to buzz us in to the sign-in room. There we each had to provide our full name & address, social security number, drivers license number, relationship to the inmate, & 3 forms of ID. Additionally, my friend had to provide the plate number for her car & a corrections officer searched it. After that was done, we waited to be admitted into the next room.

When we were buzzed in, we were given our ID's back, searched, & sent through the metal detector, then searched again. Apparently, I have metal plates in the arch supports of my shoes & they almost took my shoes away. We couldn't take our ID's in so we had to lock them in up in a little locker along with the car keys. We were not allowed to take anything with us, I even had my chapstick confiscated & locked up until I left the prison. We were buzzed through 3 more doors & passed through an outdoor walkway with 12' cement walls topped with barb & razor wire. Then we sat for 4 hours in a room with 7 guards, 7 other inmates & their visitors. It was horrible.

To top it all off, my friend complains about how her son is treated so poorly for the first hour we're back on the road headed home. News flash here - if he hadn't screwed up in a major way, he wouldn't be there in the first place! Your son gets his laundry done, meals cooked, dishes washed, free cable TV, free room and board, and $10/month for sitting on his butt in jail for breaking the law. And you want me to feel sorry for him???!!!???

I work my butt off at two jobs, raise two special needs kids on my own, attend college full time, do all my own cooking, cleaning, & washing, I can't afford cable TV, I pay my own rent & utilities out of my meager earnings, and no one gives me shit for sitting on my butt all day. To top it all off, I have a crazy ex-husband that stalks me and I don't have an army of fully armed corrections officers protecting my ass 24/7! Do NOT expect me to feel sorry for him because he doesn't like the way he's being treated.

Sorry for the rant, I'm done now.