Just whoa

Today I got to do a ridealong with some community corrections officers, you may better know them as parole officers. And just whoa. What looks like success in corrections is, well, kind of depressing. For example a filthy home is not necessarily a sign of failure. Even if it reeks of pee. Heck, the people don't need to be that clean to be successful, in the very broad terms of corrections, which basically means no drugs and no crime-doing.

So you can only imagine what it was like in the place where the one guy we saw who was *not* successful was living. Oh em gee to the max.

So we pull up into one of the skankier motels in town — which is DEFINITELY SAYING SOMETHING — and one officer warns me the guy we're about to see (if he's there) "has mental issues, and you'll pick up on that right away." Also, he's a level three (highest risk) sex offender. Now, he's not going to rape me while there are parole officers there, and honestly, he's not really the sort who's together enough to rape anyone. What he did, I sussed out from his nickname ("the Coffeestand Man"), was go through the Koffee Kat with his pants down (he likes to drive around with his pants down, as you will see in this story).

The officers (who are both huge dudes) knocked on the door and the dude comes out, leaning into the crack of the door so officers can't see behind (dude, you are under supervision, you don't get that sort of privacy and you know they like to do checks). His hair is greasy and long. His shirt is stained. He is a little belligerent, but has no problem with officers coming in. And the first thing they see is a couple of syringes on the table in front of the door, with some McKesson alcohol wipes, which I take as a personal shout-out to Ray's sister. Also, in the bathroom, there is a ridiculously skinny young woman with teeth that are black around the edges (ironically, she is lining her eyes with black eyeliner, so there's a weird aesthetic thing happening there, a mirror effect, if you will) who talks far too quickly and doesn't seem at all perturbed that parole officers are in there.

The room is filthy. There is cheese sitting out on a counter. There is filth everywhere. There is a supermarket-tupperwareish container full of cigarette butts. The bedsheets are greenish-brown from the filth. The whole place is just repulsive. One officer takes the dude out to the car to "talk to him," basically give his partner a chance to search without the dude getting aggressive. The other partner searches the room while asking questions to the woman, like who is she and what is her deal here? She doesn't have much of an answer for that, but she tells him, "I didn't even know that guy was a sex offender until one time we were driving around and he had his thing out and the cops pulled us over and told me."

If that doesn't make your head smart from the sheer cluelessness, the officer asked what she was doing with him and she said he gives her rides and he tells everyone she's his girlfriend. The officer also asked about the needles and she said they were her brother's, and he has diabetes (so naturally he scatters his needles all over, even in some dude's creepy motel room). He also asked how old she was and she said, "You think I'm underage? I'm 20." Given that crazy mental thing-out-driver is 60 if he's a day, I later asked the officers what they thought she was doing with him. They didn't even want to know. I guess they have enough to worry about.

One thing to worry about are needles. They are everywhere and they rightfully freak out the officers. There's even one under the bed, uncapped. Along with a big pile of porn, which is a no-no for a sex offender, so dude is going back to prison today.

The porn, I'll add, was generally of the "barely legal" type. One magazine advertised "100% real boobs" inside. The dead eyes of the girls on the covers was tragic. Did they realize when they posed for this stuff that mentally ill sex offenders who drive around with their dingalings out were going to be buying this? You don't suppose they felt empowered by knowing something along these lines? I felt awful for those girls.

There wasn't really anything to get on the girl, even though the officers found little tiny cotton balls and a spoon in the bathroom with a little tiny burned cottonball in it (apparently heroin users "filter" the cooked heroin through the cotton. I wonder how it is that they can heat that stuff up and then inject it into their veins at, presumably, a high temperature). Somebody has been using.

It was very depressing. And because the officers had to take him to Shelton right away, me and the photog ended up getting rides back to my car with Aberdeen's finest, who came to assist. The guy who gave me a ride turned out to be the Officer In Charge the weekend I worked who did not get back to me about the PUD truck theft, so he apologized. No biggie. I had my hands way too full that day, anyway. I drove like 90 miles to get a single story, going all over the county.

In all, pretty exciting day. If you have your mental health and a modicum of life skills, you should take a moment to count your blessings.