Totally pervy

I’ve gotta be honest. Visiting prison is really pervy. I mean it’s really awful too – as my friend commented yesterday, you feel a bit like crying when you leave. But it’s pretty wide-eyed-oh-my-giddy-aunt while you’re there. Yesterday there were all these well-heeled people hanging around (looking vaguely mortified) and I couldn’t help surreptitiously checking them out, thinking, “Oooooh, what did your daughter do???”  Drugs, murder, robbery, assault …  the possibilities are endless. Kelli Lane (the one with the permanently missing baby) is invariably in the visiting room, perched on a bolted-down metal stool. Usually it’s her mum and daughter who visit. But yesterday it was two Asian women. And I was like, “ooooh, I wonder why they’re visiting her … and “oh my god, I hope they weren’t sitting behind us when we loudly wondered if Kelli was a drama-queeny troublemaker”) Then there’s all the surprising stuff you discover while chatting to your incarcerated friend. Like how everyone in jail is allowed to smoke like chimneys wherever and whenever they like and if you’re their non-smoking cell mate you just have to suck it up. Or that you can only buy three shades of hair dye: blonde, brown or black (argh, I’d be stuffed). Or how all the electrical appliances have to be see-through so the prisoners can’t hide contraband in them. Which means there’s this whole manufacturing industry for see-through appliances in prisons. Bizarre. And that there used to be stoves in the prison wings, but they had to remove them so prisoners didn’t put each other’s hands on the hotplates. And how the prisoners aren’t allowed to have fruit because they might turn into alcohol that smells so bad you want to vomit but you have to try so the others don’t think you’re going to dob them in. And you think FARK how does anyone go into prison and not come out worse. I mean, I can’t suggest a better alternative, but I don’t think they’re reforming anyone. My friend has been there 10 years and she reckons the place is a revolving door. People just reappear over and over and over again, sharing tips with each other on new crimes to commit. When your two-hour visit is up, you walk back into the sunlight and line up at a little window to put money into prisoners’ accounts (so they can buy stuff like hair dye) and there’s a guy at the front of the queue with a plastic bag, trying to withdraw the money from his prison bank account because he’s just been released. He’s cheery, but not as excited as you’d expect someone to be who’s just been given his freedom (and, while we’re at it, what did he do to get in there in the first place?) (plus, he’s all alone, which is so, so sad). Then you walk back to your car, which is parked beside the prison childcare centre – geez – and drive off to lunch. We went to New Shanghai and ate orgasmic stir-fried rice cake with crab, shallot pancakes and pan-fried pork dumplings. Meanwhile, our incarcerated friend returned to her cell for a stodgy-airplane-food-style lunch, designed to slow the prisoners down so they don’t cause too much trouble (my theory). And you feel a bit wrong about it. A lot wrong. So you’re pretty quiet as you suck your crab legs. But life goes on. So you inhale another dumpling, breathing a secret sigh of relief that you’re free.