San Francisco Chronicle

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Every Friday my class reads a newspaper. The light went on one day in my dull mini-cranium about two minutes into the lesson. The kids knew lots of words I didn't know, such as: sally port, non-contact visit and CO. We were reading an article about prison. Did I mention that my students are fifth-graders? That means they are 9 and 10 years old, mostly Latinos. All of them are sweet like chocolate, cute to the max, and wise to the bone ... about certain things.

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"What's a sally port?" I asked.

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"Oh, teacher," replied Carla. "That's the wire cage room thing you have to go in to get into the prison."

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Another kid chimed in his Michoacan accent. "But there are two of them."

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"Two of what?" I asked, completely clueless.

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Carla answered, "Them wire cage room things. You have to go through two of them." She stared at me with huge, deep black eyes.

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"Teacher," a third child joined our discussion, "You can't wear no metal in your belt and no gray shirts cause they is the CO's colors."

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"CO?" I asked. I was pretty sure my eyes were getting big then.

Carla turned and rattled off a question in Spanish to a seatmate named Javier. Javier mulled it over, and informed me, "CO means correction officer."

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Holy cow! That was when the light went on in my feeble little head. The gray matter worked. I got it.

"Um kids, let's do a survey. I swear by the Great Wamboogie (a death vow of honesty and sacred intent I have trained my kids to honor) I will not tell a soul about the results of this survey. If I do what happens?"

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A student raised her hand.

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"Yes."

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"If you rat us out we get mucho tickets."

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"Correct. One hundred tickets each, to be exact. (Tickets are a good thing - they can be redeemed for pizza with the teacher, buy their way out of detention, etc.)

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They knew the drill. Heads went down on top of desks. "No looking," I said. "If I see any eyes, you pay me 50 tickets ... for each eye."

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They wrapped their arms closer around their small heads.

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"OK, here goes. You have to tell the truth. No Pinocchios. One hundred percent Grade A el trutho. How many kids have ever visited a prison?"

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Five hands went up.

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"Teacher?" Their heads stayed down.

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"Yes."

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"What about jail?"

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"What do you mean?"

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"You want us to raise hands if we visited jail too? Because that's different from prison."

 

Mother of God. Don't lose it here.

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"Um, yes, if you have visited prison or jail please raise your hand."

 

Six more hands went up.

 

Eleven! Eleven of my 28 kids had visited incarcerated relatives.

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That was two years ago. Now I know lots of incarceration vocabulary words and the minutiae that accompany them. I've been behind the wire five times to visit a favorite former fifth-grader in prison. He's been incarcerated for 12 years; he started in Tracy, progressed to Corcoran and currently resides in a SHU (segregated housing unit) in Salinas Valley State Prison.

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I can bring in only two keys and my driver's license - no pencils, no wallet, no paper, nada. I now know firsthand what a sally port is - a wire prison entrance cage, 20 by 20 feet. I step alone into one after being thoroughly security checked. A gate behind me closes, and I get into the second sally port. A CO behind me clicks a button, and a gate in front opens to another sally port. I then walk alone to the visitors center. In the center, free roaming inmates get to sit at knee-high tables with their family members for as long as six hours.

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I only have 45 minutes on one side of a tiny, Plexiglas maximum security cell. My former student will sit on the other side. When he enters he is chained at the ankles and waist and handcuffed. He shuffles in, backs up to the door, places his hands in a slot and is unhandcuffed. We then talk via telephone. My former student has vastly increased my prison vocabulary: potty patrol, extraction, lockdown, shooters.

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Potty patrol is what happens to an inmate when he is suspected of using drugs, harboring a weapon in his body or concealing messages. Inmates have to defecate in a bucket, and the contents are checked for the aforementioned items. Extraction is what occurs when inmates don't cooperate and need to be taken out of the cell. Sometimes stun/teargas grenades are used when the inmates resist. Lockdown means the status of the prison just changed from things as normal (watch everything) to watch everything like a hawk and then watch it even better. Shooters are the correction officers placed in the towers with M-14 rifles. They may use rubber bullets the first and second time. Third time is real.

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My fifth-graders teach me a lot. Particularly if I get it. And as for that class ... Yeah, I kind of ratted them out on that private, head-down swear-on-the Great Wamboogie survey. They did get 100 tickets each. But I'm afraid that is the least of their worries.