A Day In The Life

Hide And Seek

It is count time. Easy enough. Inmates are locked into their cells, they stand, and another officer and I count. Seems like an easy task really.

So another officer and I count. We announce the count and instruct the inmates to turn the lights on and stand up. We go down one row and compare counts. We are good. We go down the next row. We are good. We go down the final row. I count 47. She counts 48. Damn.

We recount. We go down row one and we are good. Row two is good too. Row three and we both have 47. She figures she must have miscounted the first time. It happens. We count upstairs. We are good. We add up our totals. We are awesome. We call in our count. We are wrong. Damn.

We recount. The same thing happens downstairs. We are the same on the first two rows, but the third row, we are off. Again we count the downstairs, and again we agree on the number. Again we count upstairs. Again, we agree. We add them up and call it in. Again it is wrong. Really.

Now I am mad. If the inmates had been standing for count, we could easily have counted them and been correct and moved on. But they were not and I had been keeping a list. Now that we have miscounted twice, the lieutenants and everyone have to come over and see what we are doing in there. We are going cell by cell identifying each individual inmate. Amazingly enough they are all now accounted for.

What do you suppose had happened? The inmates were messing with us. When we came to count, they would crouch up against the door so when I looked in I couldn't see them, but when the other officer came by they'd be there. Hilarious.

You know what else was hilarious? By the time we finished counting and I finished writing the incident reports for those inmates who did not stand, count time was over and it was time for a recreation move. Of course, I had been so busy with that, I had not unlocked the cells yet and by the time I finished unlocking the cell doors, the move was over.

Hilarious.