Ein|sperren - To Lock Up

Prison life doesn’t look like much fun. Besides the occasional snooker-ball-in-a-sock beating and showery bum rape, it just looks terribly dull. Unless you’ve done something horrendous, chances are your fellow inmates will mostly be a boring mix of relatively sane petty thugs, that may or may not want to subject you to an intense fist or willy-based pounding. In terms of interesting conversation potential, the psycho killers outdo the smack addicts and burglars any day. I’d much rather hear a chilling account of consuming a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with baked beans and a nice Lambrusco, than another humdrum tale of granny-mugging or car theft. Speaking of criminal chit chat, I was on a train to London the other week and felt I‘d lucked out with an almost empty, very quiet carriage. Running a bit late and needing to pee, I’d decided to do it on the train. In the toilet. Seconds before departure, a band of three shady guys, to whom I took an instant prejudicial dislike, decided to take the table directly across the isle from me. “They’re reserved, mate,” one said to the apparent leader, although using the correct there/their/they’re seems a bit inappropriate. So rather “There reserved mate,” to which he responded by pulling out the seat reservation markers and saying something like “Well, they’re (sorry, their) our seats now!” Within minutes they were guzzling special brews, talking about meetings with parole officers, and discussing the best weed connections in East Anglia. Being an hour and forty minutes from Liverpool Street with a bladder full of ex-orange juice and coffee, you can see my dilemma. While I’d hate to show any lack of faith in Her Majesty’s ability to reform, I didn’t quite feel like leaving all my stuff on the seat to visit the bog. The alternative would be to take everything with me, which to my over-analysing brain would light up a massive flashing I DON’T TRUST YOU SCUMBAG CONS sign - not an overly attractive option either. Moving to a different part of the train would generate the same sign, only in lowercase letters, and more a gentle blinking than flashing. I didn’t fancy losing my Ipod, jacket or chocolate bars, nor being subjected to a retaliatory we’ll-teach-you-for-not-trusting-us bashing, so did the only thing possible: risk damaging my bladder by painfully holding it in for nearly two hours. Which was made all the more difficult by some of the hilarious things they were saying. I’ve not got time to share them all, because I need a wee (and have done every fifteen minutes since that journey), but my favourite was, and I‘ve translated this into relatively proper English, “Ha! Made me laugh. This is the first time I’ve been released from prison where they’ve given me condoms. What am I supposed to do with them? I ain’t ever used one in my life. I take my chances.” I laughed out loud and had to jab my finger really obviously into the book I was fake-reading to make the outburst appear unrelated. But then started to feel awful for the hundred or so illegitimate children and fresh infections he’d almost certainly helped create. Forget giving out free condoms on release - try mandatory castration. Or even a crude, rusty scalpel-based sex change. Turn every male ex-con into an ex-man and the re-offending rate would drop off the chart. They’d be laughed out of drug deals and bank robberies with their uneven tits and hairy legs. What’s the worst that could happen? If anything it’d make crime more of a comedic spectator sport and far less scary. Well, the image of hundreds of badly botched-job transsexuals trying to be taken seriously as proper wrong’uns makes laugh anyway.