Living under the Thumb

Little no-nos that can get you a conduct violation and disciplinary sanctions here at Crossroads Correctional Center:

• Leaving your hat or sunglasses on when you enter the chow hall
• Repurposing a brown paper bag from the canteen as a trash or storage receptacle
• Showing a tablemate at the library something in a book you're reading
• Having more than twenty-five loose photos
• Bringing a packet of sugar back to your cell after breakfast
• Sewing pockets into your personal clothes
• Failing to report a bruise, scrape, or cut, even if you don't know how you got it or that it's there at all
• Exiting your cell without turning off your TV, radio, lamp, et cetera
• Borrowing a CD
• Being too close to someone else's cell door
• Drawing a map, any map, even if it's a map of Middle Earth
• Sleeping too deeply to hear the announcement of a custody count
• Keeping a rag in your cell
• Keeping any cleaning solutions in your cell
• Not keeping your cell clean
• Draping a cord or wire across your cell
• Holding on to medication issued to you more than a month ago
• Doing anything crafty or creative with stuff you've got lying around
• Using the toilet when a guard walks past your cell, even if the guard didn't announce his or her presence in the wing
• Forgetting to sign out after using a typewriter or law-library computer
• Setting anything on your window ledge
• Covering your shadeless lamp to block the glare of a bare forty-watt CFL bulb



• Standing too close to the front of the wing when you're not on the phone, using the touch-screen canteen kiosk or one of the clothes dryers, or looking at the bulletin board
• Placing anything under your cell door to dampen the shouting and noise of the wing
• Tearing a page from a magazine, whether it's yours or not
• Hanging a picture a few inches too far to the left, or the right, on your cell wall
• Not letting a door close behind you
• Leaving your ID in the pocket of your other pants
• Keeping a bottle, box, tub, or bag after the foodstuff originally packaged in it is gone
• Having a hole in your bed sheet
• Loaning someone your pen for a moment
• Arriving more than fifteen minutes late for a medical appointment
• Wearing headphones in the wing
• Amassing more than two bars of soap
• Picking up basically anything you find on the yard
• Hanging wet clothes to dry
• Sitting on the stairs
• Exercising in the wing
• Letting more than six magazines stack up in your cell
• Drinking too much before a guard comes to give you a random surprise drug test
• Pulling your shirt over your nose to filter a bad smell
• Walking too quickly
• Walking too slowly

Sometimes the fact that I've only gotten three conduct violations in sixteen years (all of them minor) astounds even me.