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Stan* discusses the jail layout
Orange County Jail Interview
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Jail Media: Let’s talk about the layout of the jail – how many blocks are there? In the jail you were in? Or do they call them something else?
Stan Smith: They call them barracks or dorms. The facility I was in down at Orange County held about 5,000 people. So there are probably about fifty dorms with a hundred inmates in each.
Jail Media: Do the different barracks have names or are they different numbers?
Stan Smith: Actually they’re named by letters. Like A, B, C. They call them by like alpha, bravo, stuff like that.
Jail Media: So they’re kind of military-style names?
Stan Smith: Well, yeah, the cops who run the jail are basically all ex-Marines. They run it like a military camp. It’s really made to discipline you and make you not want to come back.
Jail Media: And when they were deciding what barrack to put you in, how did they decide that? Was that based on your crime or anything like that?
Stan Smith: Well, I think so – I think the computer basically decides everything. I’m sure the computer takes your crime into account.
Jail Media: They probably do some separation – I mean, they would have to separate out sex offenders, right?
Stan Smith: Oh, yeah – they definitely do that.
Jail Media: Because those people would be killed in the regular population, right?
Stan Smith: Well, actually, that’s already happened. That was in the news while I was in there – sometime in March 2007 somebody was killed in there for being a sex offender that slipped through the cracks and somehow got put in general population.
Jail Media: How would the inmates know what another person’s charges are?
Stan Smith: The story is that two guys have been killed under the same guard’s watch.
Jail Media: So he may be telling the inmates other inmate’s charges?
Stan Smith: Possibly – or maybe he’s just giving the other inmates a certain look when the guy comes by to let them know.
Jail Media: And the inmates, I’m guessing, probably aren’t allowed to talk about it. But if you guys have TV don’t you occasionally see things on the news about people coming to the Orange County Jail?
Stan Smith: Occasionally – I mean, the guards are supposed to monitor for things like that. We’re not supposed to watch stories about people coming to the jail and stuff, but a lot of the time these guards are asleep. They’ll be right in front of us, you know, twenty feet away, and we’ll see them dead asleep.
Jail Media: Out of curiosity, since you have been to a few different jails, is there anything that you thought was nice about the Orange County Jail? I mean, anything about the dorm or anything like that?
Stan Smith: It’s very clean.
Jail Media: And the inmates clean it I assume?
Stan Smith: Yeah, and that’s part of the whole disciplinary side of it. Everybody has to take a shower every day to keep up their hygiene. I think that’s pretty important because there’s a lot of disease floating around that place.
