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sweet spot of repression
Thursday, April 2 2009
I was back with Jed in the Eastern Correctional Facility today, this time to replace six old 2000-vintage Pentium II computers with sleek modern Core Duo boxes bearing the Dell brand. Authorities in Albany had determined that all the old computers had to go, since they couldn't be easily networked. This had marked a reversal of policy from when this college-prison partnership began, when only old computers had been permitted for use by prisoners.
When I rolled up to Eastern this morning, Jed was smoking a cigarette, the first I'd ever seen him smoke. He'd just been told that only one LCD monitor was on the gate clearance, and (the way things go at Eastern) the stress had driven him to smoke. It was a beautiful day for being outside smoking a cigarette. Too bad we'd soon be behind those cold stone walls.
Ms. Zero Tolerance must have been on a new prescription today, because she was in an unprecedented good mood, even cracking jokes and smiling at them. The gate clearance went much more smoothly than usual, and there didn't turn out to be a problem with the monitors.
The thing that sucks most at Eastern these days is that there is a new, extra-repressive Deputy of Security who has made it his business to make life more unpleasant for everyone at the facility, particularly prisoners, volunteers, and people like me who are being paid by outside entities to work there. For me, the most direct evidence of this new repression has been the policy of locking Jed and me in the computer lab as we've worked on the computers. In the past, we (and the prisoners) have been free to range wherever we've needed to go in the school block. But now we have to page somebody if we need to do anything outside of the room. Matters become especially ridiculous when we have to move hardware from one locked room to another. Sometimes we're actually locked into a room for the thirty seconds it takes to gather up a computer, mouse, monitor, and keyboard. Then of course we have to wait with this awkward armful while the door of the destination room is unlocked.
The new Deputy of Security might think he's doing the right thing by cracking down hard and making the prison more like a medieval dungeon, but my view is that eventually he'll have to liberalize his policies. Too much repression leads to increased prisoner backlash, and such incidents find their way into logs. At some point there will be a review of this new Deputy of Security's performance, and the objective evidence of more logged incidents will work to undermine his mandate. Similarly, a Deputy of Security who proved excessively lax would also see an increase of logged incidents as prisoners tested the limits of their freshly-liberalized conditions. Even repressive environments like prisons trend toward that sweet spot of repression where operations proceed most smoothly.
By around 3pm, Jed and I had done all that needed doing. The new lab was all set up, the printer and been moved over, and all the workstations were on the local domain. Under the new repressive rules, the printer now had to be in a cage. It just barely fit in the cage we'd bought for the servers, a bulky yellow box originally designed to store propane cylinders.
We're consulting with a guy who knows more about enterprise-level Windows networking, and he'd hoped for us to be able to pull the server out of the lab today so he could impose suitably-repressive Group Policies remotely, but this had been nixed by Albany, because the statewide prison computer honcho had yet to inspect the computer to make sure no prisoner data was leaving the facility. This same honcho had also demanded that the old workstations be removed from the prison at the end of our work today. Amusingly, while the server had never yet been used and contained no prisoner data, all the old workstations were loaded with prisoner files. (In the old pre-networked paradigm, all the data had to be stored locally.) Absurdities like this pervade our interactions with the prison authorities, so at this point we've learned to shrug, keep quiet, and just do what we're told.
Those old computers (along with their bulky old CRT monitors) all ended up in the back of my Subaru Outback. On the way home, Jed wanted to celebrate a successful day by stopping at the Nibble Nook in Stone Ridge. That place was closed, as was the place across 213 from the High Falls Food Co-op. So we ended up at the High Falls Café, across the street from the Egg's Nest. I've lived up here six and a half years, and this was the first time I'd ever been there. Having a music stage and smelling of beer, it was geared to a younger crowd than most of the places I frequent. I'll probably never go there with Gretchen, since she doesn't try out new restaurants unless they are Indian, Thai, or vegetarian. I ordered a veggie burger with mushrooms that wasn't too great, though the fries were pretty good. They also had Hurrican Kitty on tap, which both Jed and I ordered pints of. Jed's girlfriend met us there and we all talked shop: the prison and the child welfare group she works for. I also talked about the genetic craziness that runs in my family, an especially amusing story if I include the part about how Gretchen had the straight-talking cojones to bring it to my attention.
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