EXPERIENCE REVIEW: Enrollment In The Riverside County Work Release Program

   This tale begins in late November 2012:
   As part of my sentencing I was given 21 days of work release. If all had gone to plan those days would have been finished by the following April but due to my constant fuckery I ended up having to re-enroll several times, thus prolonging an already wearisome element of my penalty throughout nearly all of 2013.
   My first go-round I forgot to bring my contract to the first day of service, which is grounds for termination. Then when I went to get re-enrolled I gave the cop lady an expired ID card so I had to go to the DMV and wait 6 to 8 weeks for the replacement to arrive. By the time I actually began my work days it was basically the time of year I originally should have been finishing up.
   The first work site I was placed at was Southwest Detention Center, sorting and folding prisoner laundry for a day a week from April through July. It was tedious and occasionally gross but not as bad as serving real time. Nearly everybody in the program at some point or another also justifies things by saying "hey at least we're not picking up trash off the side of the road!" although I don't really understand how that would be objectively worse than handling used prison clothes.
   My final day at that site was the 4th of July, which was an odd exercise in patriotic irony: unpaid prison labor says a lot about what America stands for after all.The supervisor cops were barbecuing on the loading dock and clearly wanted to get out of there as well because we were unprecedentedly allowed to leave early that day, around noon. One of the other guys I was working with was a weed dealer so we went and smoked a few bowls at the Carl's Jr. nearby Southwest after we got out.
   The next week I woke up late and as soon as I saw the clock I realized that I was gonna be marked absent, and an absence equals a termination. Back to the enrollment lobby it was.
   The next site I got assigned to was the Murrieta Police Department, where the 'labor' was even easier than the laundry I had been doing at the jail. Basically they tasked myself and another dude to wash 6 cop cars in 8 hours; even if I had been alone and working as lazily as I possibly could, that amount of work in that amount of time necessitated a large amount of downtime. During our many extended breaks I read the entire "Feral Faun" collection zine, which in its way also held a strange social irony much like Independence Day at the jail did: I would assume that most progressive anarchist manifestos were not written with the intention of them being read inside a police station in-between car washes.
   Unfortunately I (once again) woke up late just the very next week so after only one day at the cop carwash I was (once again) terminated from the work release program. By then I only had 3 or 4 more days left to complete, I just wanted to get it over with, so I went back to the jailhouse the next day to (once again) put myself back in the system.

   The building that houses the WRP processing office is the same one that non-criminal people go to when they want to visit their incarcerated family members or to put money on their books. I addressed the plexiglass-guarded officer at the front desk and he told me to sign the clipboard and take a seat, which I did. Across from where I sat was a woman who kept a fixed stare at the wall above my head and a lawyer who somehow looked like a priest. A younger cop from the back called out my name and I came to his office to give him my ID and enrollment sheet. He told me to go sit back down while he processed me.
    When I went back out to the lobby, the priest-lawyer was at the glass-window-desk asking to put $20 on his client's books and saying he would greatly like to discuss their case as soon as possible.The cop looked the inmate up in their database and said something to the effect of "something is going on in his pod. It might be awhile." In my head I imagined a fight over Ramen. The inmate's representative went back to his seat.
   Presumably having overheard that exchange just as I had, the woman with the fixed stare stood up and went to the desk. "I've been waiting here for over an hour!" to which the officer replied, "It's a process." She sighed heavily, tensely ran her hand through her hair from her forehead back, and walked outside.
   The work release officer came back out to the lobby.
   "Ian?"
   I stood up and went with him again to sign the conditions of my new program. This time they had assigned me to the Lake Skinner location, which I had heard from other ne'erdowells in the WRP shuffle was the easiest of all locations. A few people told me I could probably even blaze there while "serving my time"  because the supervisors are so lax.
   My visit had taken less than 10 minutes.With my new contract in hand I passed by all the nervously waiting people in the lobby, past all the innocents being reprimanded by administrative officers for asking questions.
   I sat on the bench outside of the jailhouse and called for a ride home. While I was waiting, I noticed the woman with the fixed stare pacing back and forth a few meters ahead, near the palm trees that decorate the Riverside Superior Court's exterior. Her arms were firmly crossed and her stare was still fixed, only downwards now.
   Maybe 2 minutes after I sat down, a mother with 2 small children swiftly pushed the lobby door open and stormed out. Without stopping as she passed, she told the pacing woman, "we've been here for 4 hours. They said something's going on ''in the pods,' I don't know what's going on, but we won't get to see them today." Her voice was a mixture of frustration, disappointment, and sad disbelief. Other people who had been in there began walking out behind the mother, each carrying similar countenances, presumably having spent the majority of their day in that unaccomodating brick-and-plexiglass waiting chamber only to be sternly told that it was all for naught and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
   The pacing woman continued her measure after everyone had passed her by, her arms still crossed and her gaze still downward. Every now and again she would kick the bulbs that fall onto the concrete from the palm trees, each kick delivered with less and less vigor. She didn't want to believe what the mother had told her. Eventually she did turn towards the parking lot and walked back to her car, still staring down. Before she opened the door she stopped to take off her glasses and wipe her eyes.
   I was the only person remaining outside the jail lobby at this point, until a minivan parked and a clearly-frazzled woman unloaded several small children, herding them towards the building. It was an obvious ordeal for her to corral them, these children who will not understand why they still can't see their brother or father or whoever it is that they never get to see, even now that they're here where he is.
   A part of me wanted to tell her before she made it all the way to the door that the effort was useless, that she wouldn't get to see her loved ones today because they were busy making further problems for themselves here in their place of punishment; but then I realized, who am I to tell her that?
   I'm barely beyond the bars myself, I'm just some derelict of unknown offense, a criminal sitting shiftily outside the entrance to the jail.
   I came here and was dealt with immediately because I am amongst the guilty. Who am I to tell her that she came here for no reason, that she wasted her and her children's time and hope; that there is no function or utility the authorities within that building can possibly provide to a well-wishing non-offender at the present time?
   That's for the cops to tell her.
   She shuffled her family into the lobby and soon after my ride pulled up to the curb.
   "I can't wait until you're done with all this crap, son," Dad said to me while keeping a fixed stare over the steering wheel. "I really hate being here."