A Gringo Doing Time In Costa Rica – Part V Inside

I was convinced of the wisdom of the strategy I was going to employ here, which was basically to follow what the guards did.

Be bored and don’t waste any energy on hogwash and baloney. Don’t get excited for good or bad. Whatever you’re supposed to do, if you pay attention, you’ll pick it up. Don’t get your hopes up about stuff. Don’t always be looking for someone to help you. You just make yourself a target for whatever type of sociopath that is in here looking for a rube to touch, and I could tell that there were plenty of those guys around just by reading the tattoos.

My first day in the jail I was already up at 6am when the guards walk through and open up the gates to the bathroom/shower, the three other modules and the outside. Coffee appears set up on a 5 gallon bucket dispensed from a 3 gallon thermos with no spigot.

First come first served. I dip my cup in the hot pool and my cup leaks all over the floor, broken in the night as I slept on it. A guy gets me another cup and a warning “no lo pierde!” Don’t lose it! Someone hands me a piece of bread, a kind of hot dog bun. “Come!”

Back in the bunk to think and watch.

Everything is on a schedule, like tides. Sunrise, people shower and coffee arrives; TV goes on; morning food, heavy traffic to the sinks; fútbol after lunch; sundown in your module for prisoner count; locked in module after 8; 11 TV goes off.

There’s only a few things that one can do in jail. Notwithstanding, people demonstrate that their hyperactive attention deficit disorder behaviors are up to the challenge. Some people just cannot be bored. Deals, ploys and intrigues are going down constantly. Hustlers are hustling hustlers. There’s lots of crack heads in here.

Everyone has to talk about How Much They Owe. When you meet someone, you say “cuanto debe?” (How much do you owe?) and/or answer “nombres mae, debo 600 mil.” (Yeesh mate! I owe 600,000) Followed by How Soon Do You Get Out. Which is where everyone spends at least a little time in socializing discussions over legal issues, emotional issues, the sad stories, the elusive hope.

Conversation is endless in here. People talk in their sleep. They come up while you’re sleeping and try to get you to talk about why you don’t want to talk. You can get desperate trying to get away from it.

There’s only a few places to be in jail. There is no escape from the noise in any of those places. The light is terrible in all of them. People spit on all of them. Only a privileged few are housed with any relative guarantee of personal security for themselves and their belongings. The remaining majority can expect to be robbed at any time for anything at all if left unattended.

I fell asleep after lunch. I forgot to pick my sandals up off the floor and put them under my head, and when I woke up for coffee an hour later, they were gone. Oh well. One less thing to worry about keeping. Bare footed, I went to fill my not-broken cup. 25 or 30 men ambled around in the module doing the same, but most of them had shoes on.

Among them was one who kept asking me if I wanted to give him my shorts when I left. He only had one pair. I told him I only had one pair too, and that I wasn’t leaving soon. But he insisted, I could just call my friends and get another pair. And here he was with just one pair of shorts and how could he deal with that. He didn’t have any family to visit him. And considering that my friends were going to pay my pension any minute now, why not be a nice guy and just give him the shorts? He was starting to turn my hair white. Hustling the pants off a guy who just had his shoes robbed. What a jerk.

A guy approached me and sympathetically asked about my bare feet. I told him the sandals were gone somewhere and I wasn’t expecting to see them again. He told me he would help me get them back and I totally ignored him. I wasn’t faking. I really didn’t care about the sandals, or anything I had on. I had made up my mind about these things.

“Desire is the root of all discontent.” Zen wisdom.

“Renunciation is the only form of human activity that is not inherently debasing” E.M. Ciorann!

The guy disappeared, then reappeared inside of a couple of minutes. He had my sandals. He presented them to me in a theatrical flourish and waited to see my emotional reaction after having been so heroically rescued and restored to my property by this excellent individual. He got his wish, I was grateful. For the next few hours anyway. Until another guy asked me about the whole thing and told me that it was the same kid who stole the sandals who brought me the sandals back. I didn’t get all excited about it, I wasn’t looking for anything from that guy anyway. He thought he’d play me for some kind of “grateful gringo” or something. Thanks for bringing back the sandals though.

The public phones shared by all 150-180 men are grouped into the corner of the building in Módulo D. 2 are dedicated to incoming calls, and 2 are for calls out. There is a bench with space for 3 or 4, and the line forms after that out onto the open floor. The incoming calls are taken by a pair of volunteers rotating from each module. They answer and retrieve the call recipient, shouting out names and nicknames at the top of their lungs all day and evening from 6 am to 8 pm. “Cedilo ceDILO!” “WINI PU… WINI!!” “Jupas Jupas!! Cabezas!”

Módulo D is both the main entrance and exit for all the modules to and from the baths, the yard and the outside. There is always a lot of decibel pollution, that is, screaming and yelling in that module. The high open ceiling roofed with sheet metal does an excellent job of combining those decibels with the distorted TV decibels into a legitimate cacophony of raging hot, howling background noise.

Before 8 am when the TV sparks the sonic explosion, phone calls are relatively intelligible. After 8am until 8pm, phone calls can be futile, at best difficult. The lines can be long and there is a 5 minute limit to all calls. The calls all announce themselves to the prospective recipient with an introductory recording warning that this is a call from the Pen. Lots of people just hang up at that point.

I made a collect call that first day to Julio to see if he had parked my car and to arrange for him to come visit on Saturday, visiting day. I need him to bring me toilet paper and soap and some clothes and a towel from my house. I want my agenda and a pen. I want a list of phone numbers. I want to talk about long-term plans and get off on the right foot. I expect to be here the whole 6 months. I need help to deal with my mother, rent, car, belongings. This is going to take a little doing.

Julio told me the car was parked at his house. Julio told me not to worry, he’d bring me the things I had asked for and possibly come with Doña Vanessa from the Valle. Whatever. I just wanted to get this business organized and hunker down for the long haul.

I made another collect call, to the lawyer. I had called yesterday but my attorney, Don Eddy, was out of the country still. His associate told me to call collect from the jail because he was going to talk to the judge and try to get me out. The call was rejected, twice. So I went and laid back down.

In jail it is much clearer that one must not judge things by their appearance alone. The two calls were good examples of that because it turns out that the one that got through connected me with a false hope and the one that didn’t with a mistaken sense of abandonment. I was learning fast. Learning that every action returns an emotional dividend and that one must be wary of these. They can make illusions more powerful than facts. To feel hope from an expectation or rejection from a missed call are both vices. Neither is appropriate and both rise from the emotional conceit that invites us to get happy or sad over things we don’t really know about, like the future, or what someone else does or does not mean by something they do or do not do.

This is clearer in jail because of the condition of being locked into an overcrowded limited space and deprived of privacy and choice. This creates a fermented psychological state that works like strychnine on a rat, poisoning the victim with powerful emotional feedback loops as the means to achieve extreme sensory overload.

To avoid going nuts in other words, keep cool. Don’t get excited and don’t be looking to get excited. Take it easy. Don’t tweak out.

Talk about tweaking. Jail is a cauldron that can cook a potent concoction when the right elements are present. With a critical mass of criminal experience, hopelessness, vulnerable targets and lack of disciplined authority, the chamber is loaded. There are waves of this stuff like plasma that saturate the mood of the whole jail, they move in like weather. Clouds of suspicion, aggressive feelings, resentment, and pure malicious mischief build in intensity ending in wild spectacular events including fights that can unpredictably burst like thunderheads into the space.

It was instructive to study these events and observe who was involved so that I could watch out for certain people. Some of them are actually the caciques of the local mafia, big fish in a little backwater puddle. Running a black market of numbers, dope, stolen goods, tattoos and telephone cards. I didn’t need to be a detective to figure any of this out, it was all done right out in plain daylight really. I figured the cops had to know. But how would I know, I’m not a detective.

On my second full day in jail I was on my bunk in Módulo D, guarding my plastic cup and plate and spoon in the late morning when someone appeared and I was abruptly informed that I had been assigned to Módulo C, upstairs. Time to GO!

All I knew about Módulo C was that the malcreados downstairs in Módulos A, B and D resented it. It was like the “luxury” suite or something to them. A place where no one robbed your locker as you showered or slept, where no one robbed you at all, ever. No fights either. No spitting on the floor. A toilet seat on the toilet. Men from other Módulos cannot enter.

The prison Director selects the 32 men who get to live in Módulo C. The prison Director uses Módule C to segregate the two distinct classes of prisoners he has to manage, the sheep from the wolves so to speak.

I had thwarted all attempts to sell me contraband or anything at all by having no money. I kept to myself following directions and getting along just fine with everyone. It was obvious that I was not a street hustler so I was selected to be housed in Módulo C or so I surmise.

In any case I had mixed feelings about it. In barely two days I had adjusted really well and had my own space well defined. The initial flood of random pestering had worn off and now just a few personalities were sticking to me.

They weren’t saints nor were they mean petty thieves, they were friendly and probably petty thieves. Anyway, my being singled out and whisked like a chosen one upstairs to live the privileged life just made me feel awkward, like I was being asked to agree that I deserved better than they got. But I got over it.

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Written by Terrence who is a 53 year old Gringo living in Costa Rica.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.