Short: Anatomy of a Shakedown

Hi, readers.

At my facility, Blessington Correctional, we go on lockdowns of an average of 72 hours for seemingly no reason. I can be at work on the compound, writing tests and teaching students, when we get an early recall. We're frisked, sent back to our dorm, and told to go into our cells.

The cell doors are closed, which locks them automatically. Apart from Dorm or Blessington Control responding to an officer or Unit Manager's request to 'roll' a dorm pod + cell combination or 'roll' a dorm pod's lower or upper tier, our doors are secured, and we are securely locked in unless you know teleportation to get through a steel door or concrete wall.

The doors are generally rolled a few times a day to allow us to get our meal trays -- you know, the poorly washed ones with that Godzilla™ Reek that can spread helicobacter pylori (look it up!) across the compound -- and put them back outside the door ten to thirty minutes later. My door gets special attention in the form of one extra roll: "Insulin, come out and get your shots!"

We all spend days abed, with no access to tablet charging for 72+ hours unless someone realizes that, gasp for ADA Hearing Impairment rated people, the tablet doubles as their ADA radio per the Region 1 ADA Coordinator; denying charging means we are punishing a person with hearing loss additionally in comparison to a person with regular hearing that can fall back on the $30 peanut radio that whispers in your ear and chews $4 holes in your wallets.

At some point during this whole lockdown thing, Security comes in.
Depending on how angry they are with your pod, you might get a light shaking down (where they lightly flip your house with you inside), to a moderate shaking down ("down to your boxers! lift your junk! turn, squat, cough! pull 'em up, go sit at the tables." while they wreck your house), to a severe house inversion (add state officers joining the private employees, dogs sniffing and peeing and pooping on things, metal detectors squealing, loud bangs, drills, the flippin' works).

During this time, you share space with another person. No privacy to defecate is provided in this situation. If you're low bunk and upper bunk needs to push through a pineapple or two, upper bunk usually can hang his blanket down to obscure the lower bunk from its line of sight to the bowl (hint: the throne is about two meters away from my head as low bunk).
But when you're low bunk and you gotta go bunk, well, the best your upstairs neighbor can do is cover up with his blanket and face the wall while you perform your business.

In the not locked down world, you'd just ask your cellmate to go take a few laps while you unload behind a mostly closed door.

Eventually, after 70-something, 80-something hours elapses, you hear one last wrrrrrrrrrrr as all the doors are sequentially rolled. People creep out of their tombs, decrepit from the days of wasting away. Some shuffle immediately for the showers, having been denied any access for half a week; others wait, because they don't want to join the shitshow queue -- what's another day?
Some amble toward the phones, hoping they have been turned back on in a timely manner -- frequently, they haven't, so that's another day's wait.

And then, fifteen minutes later, we all hear...

"Count Recall! Everybody behind your doors!"

... Couldn't you have counted us before clearing the lockdown, let us have more than 15 minutes of time to do stuff? :B