Authors: Steve Bogira
When more prisoners come down the hall, Thomas splits them between bullpens one and two, jamming those chambers, the men shoulder to shoulder on the benches and the floor. The female prisoners are being held in an anteroom near the basement entrance. Thomas wishes he could put some of the men in bullpen three, but it’s occupied by the juveniles—the kiddie criminals, as the deputies call them. Most juveniles charged with delinquency are tried at the juvenile court two miles northeast of here. But thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds facing adult charges—murder, rape, armed robbery, drug dealing near a school—are bused here from the detention center next to the juvenile court for their court dates. A dozen of them who had court appearances here earlier today are on the benches of bullpen three, chatting quietly, waiting for the bus to return them to the detention center. The bus, as usual, is late. Thomas will be happier when the juveniles are gone, not just because it’ll free up another bullpen but also because of what pests the kiddie criminals can be, with their godawful whining. “It’s ‘What time’s the
bus
coming?’ ” Thomas says. “ ‘Can I get something to
eat
?’ ”
Thomas calls his adult prisoners out to the hallway one at a time and with a black marker prints a three-digit number on the back of each prisoner’s hand, and the same number on each prisoner’s property bag. Many of the prisoners already have a number scrawled on one arm, a memento from the district station. Those who end up going to jail tonight will get further markings on their hands or arms as they’re assigned to a division, a tier, and a cell. The bullpens are quiet while Thomas does his numbering. Some of the prisoners are dozing; others are studying the floor or the back of the head of the prisoner in front of them. Most of the adult prisoners have been through this before, and those who haven’t catch on quickly, understanding that remaining silent is not a right now but an expectation.
There’s always a slow learner, however. Tonight it’s a balding white man, who hails a deputy passing in the hallway, telling him he’s got a question. Thomas overhears, drops the hand of the prisoner he’s numbering, rushes into the bullpen, and sticks his nose menacingly in the balding man’s ruddy face: “Ex
cuse
me—why am I about to beat the
piss
outta you?” The prisoner averts his eyes and says nothing more. Thomas returns to the hallway.
The sergeant is never surprised when the pain-in-the-ass is a white guy. White prisoners tend to be either too dumb or too smart to do jail well, Thomas says. The white guys, like the kiddie criminals, seem compelled to
broadcast that they know their rights, he says. Female prisoners aggravate Thomas even more. White, black, or Hispanic, the women wail about everything, he says, often in grating voices. Give me fifty male prisoners instead of five females any day, he likes to say.
After he’s numbered the men, Thomas skims through their arrest reports to see if he needs to keep a special eye on anyone. Out of curiosity, too. Tonight it’s mostly the standard crowd of accused drug offenders. The only arrest report catching his attention is the one for Chester G., a twenty-eight-year-old white man charged with aggravated battery against police officers. Chester G. walked into a northwest-side station yelling obscenities, the report says, then struck one officer in the arm and another in the face.
Kevin O’Hara, a cherub-faced deputy, reads the report on Chester over Thomas’s shoulder. When Bullneck appears in the hallway, O’Hara excitedly informs him, “This guy walked into the Twenty-fifth District swinging at cops.”
“Which one?” Bullneck asks.
O’Hara peers into bullpen two and makes an intelligent guess. “The guy with the bandage around his head, whaddya think?”
Chester, olive-skinned and broad-shouldered, is sitting on the floor in bullpen two. Below the wide bandage that covers his forehead, and beneath his bushy eyebrows, one eye is blackened and swollen shut. His lips are swollen as well, and his gray turtleneck is blood-spattered. O’Hara studies Chester’s battered face from the hallway and chuckles. “I fought the law, and the law won.”
Bullneck searches the paperwork for Chester’s rap sheet, but apparently this is the twenty-eight-year-old’s first arrest. Bullneck considers himself an expert on human nature, at least on the nature of the humans brought into this basement. He wonders aloud what would prompt a guy who’s stayed out of trouble this long to walk into a police station swinging. “I think Chester’s got something wrong with him,” he tells O’Hara. “I think there’s some psych meds that Chester forgot to take. Well, let’s just ask him.” He calls Chester out to the hallway.
“So you were swinging at cops,” Bullneck says.
“I would never do it. I never did it,” Chester says.
You been seeing a doctor? Bullneck asks. Uh-huh, Chester says. Taking any medicine? Nuh-unh, Chester says with a shake of his head; nothing besides the Haldol, the Ritalin, and the Cogentin. Bullneck and O’Hara exchange looks. Hearing any voices? Bullneck asks. “Not all the time,” Chester says. Hear any voices in the police station last night? Chester nods.
“Well, you’re gonna have to stay calm tonight,” Bullneck says. “You hear any voices, tell us.”
“Yeah, don’t swing at us, just tell us,” O’Hara adds.
Chester nods and returns to his spot on the floor in bullpen two.
The bus for the kiddie criminals finally arrives, and they’re escorted out of the basement. Blackjack and Harley, apparently as fond of the youths as Thomas is, snarl and snap as they walk by.
Thomas moves some of his prisoners into the vacated bullpen, easing the crowding in bullpens one and two. A glassy-eyed young black man walking from one lockup to the next has forgotten the First Commandment; his hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker. Thomas positively reinforces him, slamming an open palm into the man’s chest. “Where the
fuck
’re your hands s’posed to go?” The man grunts from the blow, his hands jerking out of the windbreaker to their proper place.
When the bars at the entryway are slid shut for the evening at six-thirty, the basement chambers hold seventy-seven prisoners—sixty-five men and twelve women. Those are typical numbers for night bond court. (In 1998 bond court sessions were held twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends and holidays. Court officials have since switched to a once-a-day schedule, but the typical weekday total of 150 prisoners hasn’t changed. About 350 prisoners are processed on each weekend day.) The racial breakdown tonight is typical, too: fifty African Americans, fourteen Hispanics, thirteen whites. Most are in their teens or twenties, according to their arrest reports, and most are unemployed.
At seven
P.M
. the deputies prepare to move the prisoners up to the first-floor lockups behind Courtroom 100. Thomas barks out the directions, and the prisoners pair up and link arms—like first-graders, except for the handcuffs the sergeant clicks on. They follow a deputy through the tunnel to the elevator.
The caboose on this train, a prisoner without a partner—a skinny black man in a tattered jacket and dirty pants—manages to keep up with the line, no easy trick for a man with one leg, one stump, and one crutch. He hops behind the others, rebalancing himself with the crutch every half-dozen hops.
His name is Walter Williams, and he turned thirty-four just three days ago.
He lost the leg as a child. One afternoon when he was nine, he climbed into a slow-moving boxcar near his home on the south side. When he fell from the car, the train crushed his left leg. But he didn’t wallow in self-pity afterward, his brother Henry tells me later. He learned to swim, play basketball, and ice skate—the TV program
That’s Incredible!
showed him skating as a teen in the early 1980s. He also learned to fix cars. But repair shops weren’t looking for a one-legged asthmatic mechanic, so he worked only sporadically, on the cars of relatives and friends. In his late twenties
he took to snorting heroin, then to stealing hubcaps and batteries to pay for it. The flabbiest cop could catch a one-legged thief, and so he’d been arrested a half-dozen times, though no judge had ever given him more than court supervision. Yesterday afternoon he and a cousin were caught in a stolen van. The deputies in this basement know nothing about Williams’s life, of course. To them he’s just another scumbag, with three limbs instead of four.
The elevator doors rattle open. “Face the back, shut up, and let’s go,” a deputy commands. The weary elevator gradually transports its load to the first floor, ten prisoners and two deputies at a time.
Upstairs the prisoners are parceled out into three lockups behind Courtroom 100—one for the twelve women, one for the thirty-six males accused of felonies, the third for the twenty-nine males charged with misdemeanors or who have outstanding warrants. This last lockup is fetid before the prisoners arrive because of the toilet that backed up earlier today.
A prisoner in the felony lockup calls through the bars to a deputy in the hallway, asking when the public defender will be by. “Number one, I don’t know,” the deputy responds. “Number two, I don’t care. Number three, you’re guilty.”
The judge won’t be arriving for an hour or so. Some of the deputies huddle over a desk in an anteroom, studying carry-out menus. They settle on Chinese.
Private attorneys are on the way for three of tonight’s prisoners, who reached them through a phone call from the district station. The other seventy-four prisoners will be represented by two public defenders.
One of the PDs, Fred DeBartolo, arrives at seven-thirty, and begins interviewing his clients through the lockup bars. He trots through a series of rote questions about work, school, family, and financial means, recording the answers on a clipboard. Each client gets about two minutes. The prisoners all want only one thing from DeBartolo: they want him to keep them out of jail. “This is no easy cup of tea,” DeBartolo says. “A guy’s got a warrant, nothing I can do about that. They want me to get them out, but I am not a miracle worker.” DeBartolo wants out, too. Bond court is not a preferred assignment, and he’s anxious for his “ticket out of this toilet,” he says.
Walter Williams, the one-legged prisoner, hops to the bars at the front of his bullpen and calls to Sergeant Thomas. He’s having trouble breathing, he tells Thomas; he needs a whiff from an inhaler. Thomas says he can be taken to the hospital if he really wants to go. But he reminds Williams that if he does go, he’ll have to wait at least until tomorrow for his bond hearing. Williams purses his lips and considers. The central question for a
heroin addict at this juncture on the road to justice is, What’s the fastest route to my next blow? Williams should know an I-bond isn’t in the cards tonight, considering that he was already on bond for another car theft when the cops arrested him yesterday. But appetite sometimes overwhelms reason. Perhaps Williams is thinking the judge might err, or God might intervene, granting him his freedom tonight, and maybe even a bag of heroin before dawn. He tells Thomas he’ll do without the asthma meds.
A moment later a prisoner in the women’s bullpen begins shouting that another prisoner needs help. A deputy finds a white woman slumped in a corner of the bullpen. Her name is Cecilia, the women say. The deputy grasps Cecilia by the shoulders of her red-and-black Bulls jacket and shakes her gently. “Ce’lia! Wake up, Ce’lia!” No response.
Her full name is Cecilia Diaz, according to her arrest report. At least tonight it is; it’s also been Janet Long, Debra Gartner, Debra Bascaglia, Debra Berman, Debra Grandeau, and Andria Patterson. She has four felony convictions—two for drugs, two for theft. Tonight she’s in for attempted drug possession, a misdemeanor; the arrest report says she tried to buy two bags of heroin from an undercover police officer. Names change, but fingerprints don’t; the police computer found an outstanding warrant on another possession case, depriving her of an I-bond at the station.
The paperwork also indicates she’s a diabetic, so one deputy worries aloud that she may have slipped into a diabetic coma. The consensus among the deputies, though, is that she’s just dope-sick. Which merits no sympathy.
In the lockup Bullneck and two other deputies are still trying vainly to rouse Diaz, standing over her and hollering. The women in the lockup urge the deputies to call a doctor. Bullneck pivots and lets the women know the regard he has for their advice. “When we ask about doing drugs, selling drugs, or selling pussy, you can talk. Until then, shut the
fuck
up.”
Two other deputies, lured by the shouting, stand at the door of the lockup scooping fried rice out of cardboard boxes as they appraise the situation.
“You walk in there with a bag a blow, she’s gonna jump through those bars to get it,” the first one says between gulps.
“Tell her she’s got an I-bond, she’ll be all right,” the second one agrees, stabbing the air with his plastic fork.
Sergeant Thomas summons his boss, Lieutenant Hopkins. Hopkins, too, doubts that Diaz is suffering from any condition a bag of heroin wouldn’t cure. But to be on the safe side, he gets on his radio and calls for fire department paramedics. Two of them arrive twenty minutes later, toting a litter.
“I think this is gonna be a false alarm,” Thomas tells them apologetically.
The paramedics enter the bullpen and lean over Diaz. “Okay, wuzza matter, Ce’lia?” the taller one says solicitously. “What hurts, Ce’lia?” Diaz, eyes clamped shut, just groans.
The two paramedics gingerly stand her up, leaning her against the dirty beige wall. The moment they release her, she slides right back down the wall to a sitting position.
“You wanna juice her now?” the shorter paramedic says.
Soon the taller one has stuck a needle in above her wrist, plunging a dose of glucose into a vein. A deputy standing nearby edges uneasily away. “Don’t wanna get no blood from her on me,” he mutters.
The glucose fails to invigorate Diaz; her blood sugar is apparently not the problem. “C’mon, open your eyes,” the taller paramedic says. “What’s going on? What doesn’t feel good?”
Diaz mumbles something about her chest.