CHRISTMAS DINNER… LOCK DOWN!

By Gregory Marcinski

Its 10:50am Christmas morning when they call us to the chow hall for our Christmas dinner. As I wait in line to get out ID’s scanned I start to feel very alone. I think about Christmases past and better times with family and loved ones, but I put myself here and caused this similar pain for so many others — I now also feel ashamed. Eventually I got through the line and received my Christmas dinner on a plastic injection-molded cafeteria tray. The food looks impressive and as I pick it up it feels pretty hefty too. On the tray are a green bean casserole, stuffing, apple pie, mashed potatoes, dinner roles, and a very nice looking Cornish hen. I thought they really outdid themselves. I grabbed a plastic cup and got my portion of iced-tea and sat down at one of the cafeteria style tables. I said a prayer of thanksgiving and commenced to eat. The food was good but very bland. Luckily, I brought some salt with me which helped tremendously! Within a short time, however, the staff started shouting to wrap it up and clear the chow hall (the BOP is similar to the military in some minute ways. They like to “hurry up and wait”). I wasn’t even half-way finished with my meal. I still had half a hen, all of my potatoes, pie, and dinner rolls left. I quickly stripped the rest of the meat off the hen and stuffed it between my dinner rolls and wrapped this and the pie in napkins and pit it in my pocket as we were being ushered out of the chow hall. As I put my tray in the dish room window I watched as the workers grabbed the tray and dumped all the remaining food into a large plastic trash can.

Its disheartening to know how much food they throw away, and it seems at times they do this with glee. You see, we’re not allowed to take any of our leftovers out of the chow-hall. At the exit there is a TSA-like checkpoint where there is a line of guards gloved and ready to pat us down for any of this “contraband” food. If found this food is thrown in the trash. Perhaps some guards feel a sense of accomplishment from this, others seem to feel that we are stealing this food from their own personal lunch bags or something, and some guards think the whole thing is ridiculous. If people can’t finish their meal in the short window given or if they might want to save a little food for later — so what… Anyway, I managed to get through security with my leftovers intact. This proved fortuitous as I will reveal to you in a little bit.

On holidays, such as today, the dinner is served for lunch and lunch is always served early usually beginning around 10:40am. Dinner or the evening meal is given in a paper bag. Today the bag dinner happened to be another Christmas treat! Instead of the typical frozen vending machine chicken sandwich that they usually give us, they gave us fresh sliced turkey and cheese on a deli roll, a very small bag of chips, and a muffin. The whole bag and its contents weighing perhaps a 1/3 of a pound.

I went to Christmas Mass at 2:30pm, then later we went to our rooms for the 4:00pm count but right around 5:00pm an “emergency situation” took place and the whole prison went on lock-down. Even our Jewish cousins who were at the Chapel at the time getting ready to celebrate Chanukah were sent back before they even got to light their Menorah candles. After we all went to our rooms and locked us in they left us there for the rest of the evening and night. We weren’t let out of our rooms till the following morning the day after Christmas. Because I planned on calling my family and loved ones Christmas evening I missed out talking to them on this special day.

As it turns out, the lock down happened all because two individuals got into a scuffle in one of the six housing units. Apparently, while this scuffle was taking place one of the guards tried to break it up and got hit. So, in response to this the prison was locked down. While locked down I opened my dinner bag to make the deli turkey sandwich but there wasn’t nearly enough meat to make a whole sandwich, but then I remembered that I had the leftover meat from lunch. With the two meats combined I was able to make a whole sandwich! I added mayonnaise and cheese with some garlic powder and ate my dinner while I played some Christmas music on the radio. My room-mate who is Jewish wanted to hear The Chanukah Song by Adam Sandler but the station never played it. At 10:00pm we had to stand for count and not long after that we both went to sleep.

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