"Twelve!"

At Crossroads, the prison in Cameron, Missouri, where I spent almost seventeen years, the residents made a kind of hooting woop-woop sound to alert people in the wing when a guard or caseworker was doing a security walkthrough. The prisoners in question might as well have been telling everyone, "Hide your tattoo gear! Fan away that smoke! Pretend you weren't just masturbating!"

The staff hated it. Not that they rely on secrecy or stealth to carry out their daily duties, but those siren-esque noises kept guards from making busts. The way the staff viewed it, warning wing residents that the cops were on the move made you an accomplice to their wrongdoing. Thus why the head of the last Crossroads housing unit I lived in threatened a conduct violation to anyone who issued a "wing alert." This was nearly impossible to enforce and stopped absolutely no one from whoop-whooping.

I've been at ERDCC since the 2018 Crossroads riot, and while many things are very different here in Bonne Terre, wing alerts are still a staple of daily life. No one makes siren noises, though. Here they shout, "Twelve!" In the years before I came through this facility's gates, the preferred alert, at least in the honor dorm, was to yell, "Microwave!" The ruse, of course, lay in the plausibility of someone having forgotten a cup or bowl they'd been warming up. Therefore, the implicit hope was that the guard doing a walkthrough wouldn't be tipped off to the malfeasance that was possibly afoot in the wing. Pretty slick. But at some point, the cops caught on — big surprise — and a new wing alert had to be invented. How they settled on "twelve," I'd love to know. No one seems able to tell me definitively. My cellmate, Bob, suggests that it may have arisen from the old TV series Adam 12. When he was living in a different housing unit, the standard call was "microwave." By the time he moved to this house, a couple of years later, "twelve" was already in effect. It confused him then, and its origins continue to elude. Stranger still, the institution staff are well aware of what it means and why residents shout it when a guard comes through, yet they seem not only unconcerned about it but to actively encourage its use. Some take it upon themselves to announce their own entry. Others make it a joke, treating it like call and response, signifying that they're not coming in to cause a stir: "Twelve!" "Eleven! I'm just collecting a paycheck, guys." Still other guards, those with an elevated level of self-importance, add rather than subtract, a math game to signify that they aren't messing around: "Twelve!" "Twelve, nothin'! I'm thirteen, assholes!" I don't know quite which of these approaches I like less. It's hard to appreciate someone who's puffed up with a frankly exaggerated sense of their own authority, but it can also be tricky to respect someone who doesn't take their work seriously. In twenty-two years of being locked up, I've never jumped the chow line for a second helping of food, never gotten a tattoo, never had a sexual encounter with another person, and never issued a wing alert. Not that I actively oppose wing alerts, I just consider them part of prison life, which I'm mindful about not getting too involved with. If I'm being honest, though, I do think they've recently got a little out of hand. As though it wasn't enough for them to shout "Twelve!" every time a guard opens the wing door, a couple of overeager watchdogs have taken it upon themselves to add a kind of early-warning system to their wing alert practice. Now they even sound an alert when they see a guard head into the wing adjacent to ours. "Twelve going into A-Wing!" is a call I hear way more often than I'd prefer. A lot of the time, A-Wing visits are exactly that: visits to A-Wing, starting and ending over there. In certain settings, these A-Wing alerts in B-Wing would be consiered false alarms, something that, if repeatedly committed, would be reprimanded or even punished.

I like to think that I wouldn't mind so much if I knew what "twelve" meant, but I'm pretty sure that's bullshit I tell myself because I want permission to complain about the unnecessary noise.