The Jail Lobby is Pink

It’s only twenty or thirty steps from a warm spring day in the park to a pink tiled jail lobby. Twenty or thirty steps, give or take a falter or ladder rung due to circumstances that may or may not be in your control. It’s only ten or so more to an actual cell. It’s not far away, it’s right there in all of us; the justice center where we all try to find our piece of fair, our fair share of peace our own personal set of rationalizations and neurosis and law. I stared at the pink tiles to avoid contemplating the dark smudges on the walls. The kicking that must happen when someone realizes where their feet or a loved one’s feet had taken them. The sudden wall between them and the end of the road. The sudden visible divide between guilty and innocent between right and wrong. The only sounds from the metal detector gates erupt when officers of the law stroll in and out.

The pink seemed an odd choice for a jail lobby at first. You had to wonder if someone intended the ladies restroom effect, if they realized the deputies behind the glass would be female, if they pictured the women arriving with children to sit on this hard wood bench and wait for a man’s name to be called, if there had been a discount on dignity.  At first I sat up straight against the hard wood but eventually I slumped into a corner against a stain on the wall watching the people coming and going.

There’s a little girl with pig tails watching herself in a large round mirror in an upper corner. She’s smoothing her shirt down repeatedly and admiring the shine coming off her sandals while her mother fills out a slip to put money on her dad’s books and they wait to be called to go up for their visit.  She practices her smile and twirls around to watch her skirt float up around her and as she comes back around she catches her need and want in the reflected eyes in the mirror and rushes over to hide behind her mother with her skirt landing in a whoosh.

Every bit of research I can find thus far advises that children should visit incarcerated parents. And so I sit in the lobby checking things out. Memorizing procedure so that if I decide it’s the right thing I can prepare my daughter for the pink tiles and the deputies , the procedures and the way a skirt will eventually fall flat no matter how fast you spin. 




April 26, 2010