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Among the most dangerous desperadoes inhabiting Pennsylvania's
ponderous prisons are the women and men who frequent the libraries.
These are folks who can read.
Many of them can also write.
If
anything terrifies the chimeras running the Imprisonment
Department, it's convicts who can read and write.
To help combat the dire danger which literacy poses to the imprisonment business, highly skilled executives at the mismanaged state prison at Frackville in Central Pennsylvania, have a program to intimidate and harass prisoners who dare to use the library. What business does an "inmate" have reading, or worse yet, writing? Next thing you know, he'll be thinking! Operation "Gaol Gauntlet" is part of the Frackville prison strategy to intimidate and harass library users. To appreciate this essential penology tool, one must understand that, in common with many other Pennsylvania state prisons, Frackville prison has about twice the number of guards that it really needs. Hiring prison guards is the government's make-work project of choice. At Frackville there are so many that they fall over one another. In former times such featherbedding was called pork barrel. Responsible officials frowned on it. Now the public officials are Republican hacks who are never responsible. Imprisonment is Pennsylvania's only growing industry so unnecessary guards are the norm. Putting a few dozens of them on silly busy-work nonsense is an ideal waste of tax money. The Frackville Gaol Gauntlet was initiated recently when about 30 smart aleck prisoners had the temerity to attend an evening session of the library. These nerdy readers were confronted by a troop of prison bulls (that's what the cons used to call the screws, corrections officers to you uninitiated fish). There were fourteen, count 'm 14! guards including a fine, albeit oafish loudmouth and an apparently sexually obsessed toad who's rumored to have been involved in nasty prisoner abuses overseas. There were also two, count 'm 21 sergeants (indispensable foremen for any proper harassment). Commanding the comic-operetta platoon was a lieutenant with the unfortunate disposition of a painfully engorged hemorrhoid. Oddly enough, Piles was himself guilty of reading, but, perhaps, not writing. That's 17 guards worth almost $500 tax dollars for the hour that they would toil intimidating library patrons. Their mission was to bully the 30 or so prisoners in order to discourage them from reading or writing. The Gaol Gauntlet focused on feeling-up the convicts. Many prison guards have a fascination with touching certain areas of men's bodies. It's all perfectly normal, you understand. After groping the prisoners, teams of guards searched with meticulous finitude through the papers the men were carrying into the library and through their pockets and especially through their warm, odoriferous underclothing - boxers in the evening, 0 joy! Some of us who aren't "corrections" professionals might think that it would make more sense to search crooks when they exit the library. Then they might be secreting a precious state-owned tome in some undergarment. That simply exposes how little we understand the intricacies of the imprisonment industry. A penal professional knows that, while pretending to search prisoners for instruments of mayhem (Gatling guns, nuclear warheads, rocket launchers and such-like) they could actually be intimidated from daring to return to the library. The prison would be a safer place. The world would be a safer place - 0 joy!
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