You’ll never have an inmate tell you they don’t want to be on ‘COPS.’
By Liz Benston, Abigail Goldman
Las Vegas Sun Op-Ed
LAS VEGAS — So here you are stuck in a concrete cell eating a bologna sandwich with 12 other guys eating 12 other bologna sandwiches, hunching and hurting on a board-stiff bench, downwind from a fermented drunk with nothing on TV besides somebody’s bad idea of a good time a chick flick.
Welcome to the Clark County Detention Center, where movies are meant to make you glaze over and give in. The 18-inch babysitter is mounted behind Plexiglas, programmable by the powers that be.
And anybody shaking his head over corrections officers getting soft on criminals can quit now. They’re not. TVs in the detention center are a symptom of something far more sinister: inmate overcrowding.
The detention center is designed to hold roughly 2,800 inmates. Last year, it was always about 700 people over capacity. Television keeps the tinderbox from flaring up. Felony suspects in cramped quarters with nothing to do can always find something to fight over, so COs put in “Titanic,” or “Pretty Woman,” or turn on network news and let them bask in the brain-dead balm.
“You put on a Steven Seagal movie and everybody’s silent for two hours,” Corrections Lt. Richard Suey said. “And somebody always has to bring in ‘Star Wars.’”
Some detention center favorites: karate movies, action movies, the “CSI” series, the “Gunsmoke” series, Looney Tunes, anything Disney, everything sports. If they’re not watching a movie, the TV is fixed on whatever network channel comes in best. The midday block is often dominated by “COPS.” Criminals watching police catch criminals.
“They love ‘COPS,’” Suey said. “You’ll never have an inmate tell you they don’t want to be on ‘COPS.’”
Eighty-five percent of inmates, by the way, arrive under the influence. They spend hours in the booking area, waiting for fingerprinting, TB testing, a psych evaluation, something to wear. While they wait, they become as flat-faced as the TVs before them, lulled and lazy with whatever’s glowing.
Upstairs, where wings of cells and cots for overflow sleeping are spread out across the floor, the TV is a coal mine canary. In the viewing area, a “truce area,” inmate gangs and rivals sit together nicely. If they’re not watching, if the viewing area is empty, something’s wrong.
“If they don’t have something to keep their mind occupied,” Suey said, “they’re up to no good.”
Two fights a day is average.
TV has started a few fights beyond the bars as well. The fact that inmates are allowed to watch television, or read magazines, or lift weights for that matter, infuriates the get-tough-on-crime crowd, which thinks any of the aforementioned are luxuries not suited for the criminal cage. And the fighting cuts both ways federal inmates in Pennsylvania, angry about a ban on R and NC-17 movies, argued all the way to a federal appeals court. State prison officials say inmates still haven’t won the right to watch anything a 17-year-old can’t. In Colorado, inmates were not only allowed to have private TVs, they could purchase PlayStations from the commissary, The Denver Post reported. That was until inmates discovered they could turn the game systems into tattoo guns.
Nevada’s state inmates can also purchase TVs for their private viewing, but they can forget cable.
There are viewing restrictions in the Clark County Detention Center as well: No shows with racial tension, nothing depicting crimes against cops. And Suey has had to stop certain staff members who thought “Full Metal Jacket” or “American History X” might make a nice feature performance. And still some cells, like the one O.J. Simpson was in and the tanks that arriving inmates detox in, do not have anything to watch but the wall. Though that’s not to say some aren’t entertained alone in four walls.
Strolling past a holding pen for intoxicated inmates, Suey catches the eye of a young man pacing before he comes to the reinforced window and announces: “I keep hearing my hair grow. I need some meds.”
One room over, 15 women are lying all over the floor, heads leaning on shoulders, arms flailed into laps. Early morning arrests, sleeping off their night. The TV is on and one woman is awake enough to watch.
“It’s an electronic babysitter,” Suey said. “It’s a room with a view.”