Visiting my friend, who is in jail

First thing you do is take off all your stuff.   Jewelry, bandanna, coat, hoodie.    Empty your pockets, put all your shit in a tiny locker.    There are twelve or thirteen other people, mostly women, mostly Hispanic, one with two little kids -- everybody gets into a line to go through the metal detectors.  Throughout the process, I am reminded at every turn that I should have come earlier, that I just barely made it in, that I'm lucky to get into this round of visitors.

I'm visiting my friend D****, who is in jail for no good reason.   "Stupid shoplifting stuff" -- stuff you can pretty much still laugh about, even though the context is pretty grim.   Sitting on the other half of a plate-glass cell, it's hard not to think about Aaron Swartz, hacker extraordinaire, who I only knew second-hand through friends and housemates.    The internet is on fire this week after he hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment, faced with 30+ years in prison for downloading academic papers from behind a paywall.   We talk about that a bit, but it's hard -- inside the room, the sound is completely fucked up, and you have to yell to hear each other.    There are no phones, just the tiny grate, no touching, just glass.   Like having a cup of coffee in a sensory deprivation chamber.  

D**** says there are a handful of people on the other side of the wall who are political organizers.   "Most of the rest of them are here because they killed someone."    He laughs, then puts his head in his hands.   "It's kind of the wrong place for me.   But there are some pretty famous people in here."    I tell him it could be worse.    Better to be in jail, after all, than to be dead.    I ask him what it looks like on the other side.    On my side, the hallways are reminescent of Terminator 2 --- with the exception of the views, each time the elevator door clicks open, spectacularly hazy views of the Boston skyline.    He describes an atrium, a little room with a bed and a window.   "It looks out on a wall," he says, grinning, "but you can see people as they come in and out."

The weirdest thing about my side of the glass is that there are no other people.    From entrance to exit, after filling out my initial intake form, I have no direct interaction with any of the jail staff.   The halls are completely empty --- when our time is up, nobody knocks.   The lights flicker on and off, and as I head back toward the elevator, our line forms up again -- slow, think ranks of slightly cheered people, heading back out into the world outside.