The ultimate in boredom

If I haven't already said it, jail sucks.

The days are filled with indescribable boredom. I live with four or five other men in a room - depending on who comes and goes. There are no bars. Our room is one of 16 rooms - eight on the top floor and eight on the bottom floor that make up our pod in the central jail building. The center of our pod has a common room that is two stories high.

The common room has two TVs. One is always tuned to the Spanish channel and one is tuned to sports. I don't speak Spanish and don't like watching sports, so I never watch TV.

There are little tables with two chairs in the central room of the pod. There's enough seating for the 72 inmates in our pod. There's also a microwave and hot water heater to heat up food from the commissary.

There's four pods on each floor of the central jail building. Although there are six floors in the building, there are three floors that have two-story central rooms. Each central room has two floors of 16 inmate rooms.

Most rooms have two bunkbeds. Some rooms also have a twin metal frame bed in addition to the two bunkbeds - so there are four to five inmates to a room. Below the beds are metal cubes about 8" X 12" to hold each inmate's belongings. All the beds and cubes are bolted to the floor and walls.

I mostly play cards or Monopoly. Hours and hours of cards gets old really fast though.

Sometimes someone is lucky enough to get a book in the mail. Books must be sent through a book dealer and my mom orders books sometimes through eBay or Amazon. We can only get three books at a time. Magazines have to come directly from the publisher. The other guys and I share books, but there's never enough stuff to read.

We can go outside whenever we want. The empty courtyard has walls so high we can only see one patch of sky and nothing else, so I don't go out there much.

You can see the sun for about two hours a day from 5 to 7. At that time, the courtyard is really crowded with the younger inmates who speak English. The courtyard is about 1/3 the size of a basketball court and from 5 to 7 a lot of inmates play basketball. Other times, the Spanish inmates kick a soccer ball around. There are no weights, but some inmates will do push-ups and sit-ups.

People can bring us money orders for the commissary. The amount of food they give you here leaves me hungry all the time, so when I get money from my parents, I buy lots and lots of Ramen noodles so I'm not so hungry. You can also buy snacks.

Some of the prices:

Ramen noodles - .69
19-ounce jar of juice - $3
Instant coffee that lasts a week - $3.50
Stick of sausage - $1.90
Candy bar - $1
Teeny bag of chips - $1
Jolly Ranchers - $1.35
Honey bun - $1

Breakfast is between 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. Yup. You read that right. A.M.

Some days, breakfast is potatoes and meat. Other days it's grits and eggs - the eggs are made from a powder. On other days, breakfast consists of cornflakes and a peanut butter sandwich. We also get a tiny juice and a carton of milk.

We can make collect calls, but two short phone calls costs $25, so my parents can't afford that. They try to visit once a week for an hour.

Visitation is now down by video phone. Visitors go to a one-story building and see the person in jail on a monitor. On my side, I can see the old glass walls where prisoners and visitors used to sit across from one another and talk through the glass. The monitors are set inside the glass. Beyond the glass, I can see stored supplies, such as rolls and rolls of 1-ply toilet tissue.