Monday, July 20, 2009

You’re The Cool Warden Day!

Today’s the big day. The first day of Dannemora State Prison’s new morale-building program, “Rock n’ Roll Mondays.” From now on, every Monday morning when the gates are pulled back on the cells, the inmates will hear pumped over the PA system several hours of classic Rock music. You picked the first song yourself. “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. You can’t wait to see the faces of your inmates as they groove their way out of their cells to make their way to work detail.

You’re pretty sure the inmates refer to you as the “Cool Warden.” You’ve been doing everything you can to make clear that there’s really not all that much difference between you and your inmates. As you like to say at your weekly “Rap Sessions” with randomly selected groups of five inmates, they’re people just like you. They just happened to make a big mistake. Could’a happened to anyone.

“Hey, I got a little wild in my day too,” you like to tell them. “We all gotta get a little wild every now and then, am I right? But nowadays when I wanna get wild, I take it out on my ax.” Then you break out your electric guitar and play them some Thorogood. They love that.

You once even bunked in a cell with some inmates for a night, just to let them know you’re not one of those uptight wardens who’d never step foot in one of those cells except for during inspections. Sure, it ended with the inmates taking you hostage and attempting to escape, only to get their heads shot off by snipers, but you’re still pretty sure you reached them that night.

Unfortunately, Warden, today’s not going to be as fun as you’d hoped. Rock n’ Roll Mondays is going to have to be postponed when your guards find that three hacks were quietly beheaded last night. Retribution from the White Supremacists against the Born Agains for stealing one of their “Mouth Dolls” (new inmates who are abducted by a gang, and whose teeth are knocked out of their gums so that there is no bite-down risk when they are forced to perform fellatio on gang members). You’d better help everyone cool off with a mandatory “Chill Out Session” (basically, lockdown). Sometimes, even the Cool Warden has to act like a square.

Happy You’re The Cool Warden Day!