GWOT Trash Duty

A little appreciated fact of post-Apocalyptic conditions is that all public and private services are down.

All of them. Well, most of them. Every now and again the municipal mains would flow again - representing heroic efforts behind the scenes by the area water companies, who had conglomerated into one desperate "keep it flowing" organization guarded by a mix of sheriff's deputies, local private security companies, and monster truck driving rednecks.

Power was intermittent. Sometimes it would be up for days at a time. Sometimes a few hours in the middle of the day. Too often, up during the day and down at night. PG&E maintained a Web site at first trying to track outages, but people were getting PTSD from the big red area where San Francisco used to be -- not to mention copper thieves using it to target areas to salvage while the power was down -- so they gave up on that.

I've touched on police, fire and medical. I've hinted at transportation and especially fuel. But one essential public utility was entirely, beyond any shadow of a doubt impossible now. Trash collection.

At first our site trash just piled up. Then the more ecologically minded of our folks realized that we needed to recycle just as the Food Committee realized that we needed compost. So we roughed together a trash processing yard and employees who were unable or unwilling to work in other 'volunteer' roles found themselves pulling a couple hours in the trash yard.

Then after the massive attack, we had our first able bodied prisoners -- and our first disabled prisoners, all of whom continued to require medical care.

It is well within ordinary practices of jails, prisons and even POW camps to require prisoners to work. But we could not trust them to do _productive_ work, either in our fields (and learn our perimeter defenses!?!) or on our site (and learn the layout?!?).

So we set up a barracks on the perimeter of the trash yard. We fenced the yard. We established a standing guard post - two guards during working hours, one guard at night. We installed cameras and perimeter monitoring. I established additional training for the designated guards. Unfortunately we didn't have _anyone_ working for us in the guard force who had any considerable experience in handling or managing prisoners, or even giving van rides between jails and airports.

The barracks were searched weekly. We set up a training program to train certain employees and contractors - mostly janitorial - as prisoner escorts. We couldn't devote a guard to escort every time a prisoner needed to visit the infirmary. Except for emergencies, sick call was at 7 AM and 6 PM daily.

I personally spent half an hour a day with the prisoners. Typically this would be ten minutes of haranguing them, ten minutes of working with them on whatever task, and a ten minute interview with one, working from a list until I'd spoken to everyone.

Probably the most important safety precautions were reinforcing the "No Hostage Policy" and its implications, and that for a prisoner to pick up a weapon was attempted murder and would be met at once - or afterwards - with deadly force.

In the Royal Navy, to lift a weapon against a superior officer was to risk "death or such lesser punishment as a court martial might inflict." One of those punishments was five hundred lashes, with a heavy whip wielded by a big burly man. Most prisoners so sentenced bled to death from their wounds. This also gave us the phrase, "see the color of your backbone" -- because with that many lacerations, everyone did.

As far as I was concerned - and I'd run this past [CLIENT} Legal and obtained their agreement - any prisoner who wanted to leave the site was more than welcome to go right out the gate and never come back. What would happen to them afterwards was their problem, not ours. If they stayed, they stayed under our rules. They had no valid reason to ever pick up a weapon. If they did, their only conceivable motive would be to kill with it. So why wait to kill them right back?

This cut down on the potential shank problem. Any length of metal, glass or hard plastic can make a stabbing weapon. We weren't a prison and we weren't about to devote the resources to building an actual purpose-built jail facility, so we had to do something else instead. "Touch a weapon and you die" was the instead.

As for the "No Hostage" policy, we simply couldn't allow someone to put a gun to someone's head and start dictating terms - no matter who it was. Key personnel were protected, either by designated bodyguards, by going armed, and/or by being restricted to safe areas. I seemed to be an exception - I went anywhere, always armed, and only kind of sort of had a bodyguard. More accurately, I also had to supervise a heavily armed, well meaning idiot.

This morning's ten minute lecture to the prisoners was on how lucky they were to not be in a pit at the base of Boot Hill; how their current contribution was important; and how their work paid for their survival. For the benefit of any future prisoners, these rants were thoughtfully video recorded so that a new prisoner could catch up in the involuntary lecture series.

I was basically on autopilot while ranting, so I took the time to look at each prisoner's apparent health, body language, and posture (in several cases, seated in the rolling chairs they used in lieu of a proper wheelchair).

One raised a hand. I stopped and half-waved a hand, giving permission.

"Sir? I have a question?"

It was the able-bodied young man we'd taken into custody. He'd been pinned in an overturned vehicle. Brooke hadn't shot him when he'd surrendered. He hadn't actually shot at any of our folks - but he'd been a combatant traveling with a force that had.

"Go ahead," I said calmly.

"What if we want to do more than work on the trash?"

I blinked.

Got him.

"Write a request to the barracks leader."

The prisoners could bitch, moan, whine and complain as much as they liked, as long as they did what they were told. If they didn't, they could stay in their cells all day. bored to tears.

But if they wanted us to actually _listen_, they had to write down their request on a slip of recycled paper and turn it in to their barracks leader, one of the Janitorial staff who was himself a convicted felon and was willing to live in the barracks with them and help supervise their generous off duty time of 10 hours a day. I'll take skillage where I can find it, and the written request process was his idea. I'd run with it, and made a point of reading every request myself - not that the prisoners knew it.

The prisoners didn't know it, but they owed their lives not to the Corporation's good nature (we have none) or to my mercy (ditto), but the need for our medical staff to get practice in treating life threatening and major injuries, well past emergency stabilization and all the way over into recovery and rehabilitation.

But they also had intelligence value, which I planned to extract slowly and thoroughly. No interrogations beyond a preliminary apparently casual questioning session.

What I wanted was to turn them, to (correctly) help them link their personal survival with that of the site, and have them become willing conspirators against the people who had sent them here. We couldn't compel that. It took time.

And we'd just had a nibble on the baited hook.

I finished my lecture with a cheerful threat and departed stage right.

I had a word with the guard post on the way out. "Watch him carefully. Keep him safe. Especially tonight."

Not all the prisoners would necessarily like a turn-coat. We'd have to pull him after he was committed, but before another prisoner would get the chance to shank him.

Nothing like a man's own written request to either save or hang him with.