Sorry About Your Tiny Penis
The real D.O.C. culture problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a rugged guy in a pick-up truck.
I married two of them.
A pair of well-worn Red Wing work boots turns me on. I like a guy who can rope and ride and mend the fence with his rough, meaty hands. Frequently, my throwback playlist will offer me “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” and I will sing at the top of my lungs, nostalgically:
Where is my John Wayne? Where is my prairie song? Where is my happy ending? Where have all the cowboys gone?
But for all of this damsel in distress dalliance, I have to admit that I have my limits. I cannot stand the site of a guy in a lifted, customized truck.
Instant turn-off.
Without ever seeing his bank account, I know that he spent more on after-market modifications than he invested into a 401k last year. I know (that I know that I know) he is the dude dm’ing every woman in his feed all week long with bullshit like “Morning, beautiful,” just hoping to get some lame, sloppy piece by Saturday night. This is the married guy who thinks the truck-snapback-beer trifecta earns him a weekend hall-pass when his wife takes the kids to her mom's.
Gross.
Not all pick-up owners are him, but every time I see this guy I am compelled to offer him condolences.
Sorry about your tiny penis, bro.
Which brings me to prison guards.
*Yes, I know there are decent and kind and empathetic corrections employees. Yes, I know it is a difficult job. Yes, I also know what I am about to say does not apply to all of them. But, dude—
Never in my life have I seen smaller dicks in one group—at lobby desks, ducking in and out of the visitation room, in their sprawling frat party walking across the parking lot at shift change. We see their penises repeatedly because they have to get them out and measure them in front of us, all of the time.
If I get nervous when visiting, I use the old speech class trick: Imagine them naked. Imagine them naked in their black socks with nothing but that stupid taser on their hip.
Sorry about your tiny penis, bro.
But really, I’m not.
Because they have used their unfortunate shortcomings as justification for treating other people (including my own son) very badly. They took the disillusionment from their high-school locker room to the academy where other small penises taught them how to make it look bigger. Now, they get up every day and tuck it into a costume that allows them to play alpha in a world of men (and women) who only let them think that they have control.
Because trust me, they do not.
In my many years of visiting prisons all over our state, I have watched my fair share of 350+ pound, wheezing, gimpy guards struggle past. These poor souls can barely make it across the room without stopping to catch their breath to open the next door.
I always look at my son in those moments, a silent acknowledgment between us. They wouldn’t stand a chance against him nor the other 99.9% of the men inside without their weapons.
And they know it.
Honestly, I could take them if I had to. All one-hundred-twenty-five pounds of the crackling middle aged, white woman I am. I guarantee I lift heavier than some of these guys—and I've been sick for 4 years.
When it takes nine of them in riot gear to subdue a single, unarmed man who has already been cornered in a cell, when they have to kick inmates in the face and wield pepper-spray like Ax Body Spray on local bar night in 2008—it tells all that we need to know.
“Stop fighting!” they wheeze repeatedly while crushing an incapacitated, motionless prisoner on the ground. No one is fighting you, bro, that is just what an elevated heart rate feels like.
Am I being harsh?
Absolutely not.
These ‘men’ have done things to my son that you wouldn’t imagine if we didn't tell you. Yet, some of these stories are not yet mine to tell, and they may never be. I asked my son if he had examples of poor treatment to share for this piece. He thought about it for a day and then called me back to say, emphatically, no. He warned me about sharing too much.
His former cellmate was suddenly transferred to a psychiatric hospital and pumped full of Haldol after he told the public about his own mistreatment, subsequent to filing a lawsuit against the D.O.C. for injuries received at the hands of a notoriously reckless CO (since cited for breaking another inmate’s back last year).
Someday, though, we envision offering a blog series about the things that have remained unspoken here. Stories that include both the kindnesses and the horrors my son has known in prison under his guardians.
Because someone needs to bear witness.
They openly mock helpless, disabled, and elderly inmates. They laugh at them aloud. As Emmett Tatter told us recently, these guards tell grieving men that they don’t deserve their visiting mothers. They get on the intercom and joke about the psych med-line: “Come get your therrrrrapy!” one shouts over the loudspeaker, with a laugh, every morning in my son’s facility. What kind of person gets off on the pain of others? Who clocks in every day to make a suffering individual’s day harder? Who kicks a man when he is already down?
We deserve to know because we pay their salaries.
These ‘men’ make up lies and charge the people in their “care” with bogus infractions in order to lessen their own workload. They relocate warring individuals into the same cell for sport. They don’t answer calls for help—letting our sons and daughters suffer and die alone in pain. They smuggle drugs into our prisons, and they have sex with rape inmates.
No, I’m not being too harsh.
Last week, I watched through the window as my dog dug up a mole and began to bat it about the yard, flipping it into the air—playing at killing it. I ran onto the deck and shouted at her to stop. She looked up, but she didn’t stop. I had to run toward her to get her to back off and leave that helpless thing alone.
I know that this post is just me standing on the deck of the prisons of this country screaming—we see how some of you treat defenseless, vulnerable beings and we also see the ones among you who do nothing to stop it. Dogs.
Dick-less, the whole lot of you!
When I get to leave the prison where my son resides for the last time, I will thank those who have been kind—and there are a few. And then, in my head, I will slip into full crash-out mode. With everything in me, I will be saying all of the things that I have held in for five years through the hot, stinging eyes of an exhausted but fighting mama wolf—
Don’t think I don’t see your insecurity and depravity, the protected little life you live out behind your bunker walls, where you cower behind a union and a public façade of “honor.” You’re the guy who has to come to a prison to feel any sense of power in your life. You’re the guy who has the chance to make a real difference every day and instead chooses middle school. You’re the guy who will still have to be here, petty and small and ineffective, when we drive away. Good luck, bruh.
Oh and—sorry about your tiny penis.
But really, I’m not.
I love angry you in your writing bc your writing crackles w energy, rage, and truth. I hate that this is your life, your son's life, the lives of too many. I hate that we let it happen and perpetuate it.
It's a very interesting point of what's ours to tell and what's not - so well explained in your essay. Definitely, what's ours to tell is the panic that starts to rise when it's been too long before a call or email (has something happened inside that I'm not hearing?). Inevitably, some of those silences are because something has happened. We can certainly talk about the effect it has on us, on the outside. Yes, they need to be told.
On another point, putting in a legal claim while inside, is, yes a huge risk. My friend wanted me to, and I said, are you ok, are you walking? Yes. Was he in a safer place by that point? Yes. So I said, since I'm your only contact of genuine help, we are going to forgo lawyers and starting building your release package that shows zero comments of "he's difficult." This was hard to say, but it was the right advice, and it got him out when it was time to get him out, early.