PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : In the County Jail, 15 Minutes for Men Who Haven’t Got a Prayer

An ordinary day at Los Angeles County Jail. Men with ties, women in stockings come into the bright entrance lobby. Briefcases, fresh makeup, clothes that have been pressed, sunlight and space. Later, at another entrance, people will cluster in crumpled shorts and skirts, holding bags, bits of paper, children. They will chat or dream and take the afternoon sun for granted as they wait for prisoners on release. The way in, the way out--and in between, the Minotaur.

On the third floor, Chaplain Mark Maciel waits at his desk to save souls. Above his head, painted on the wall, is a quotation: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come.”

Is it morning? Is it evening? Is the line of men in the corridor outside shuffling toward lunch or dinner? What nicety to measure meals and mealtimes. In prison, there is only chow. Waiting, gobbling. Men in blue overalls, hands in pockets, shoulders against the wall, men with numbers from cells with numbers. No talking, no smoking, no giving anything away. Hundreds of masks shuffling along. Seven thousand men and more shut away in this labyrinth, men stripped, searched, relieving themselves where they lie, like dogs.

Now and again, a red-band walks alone, handcuffed, an officer behind him--in attendance, so to speak. The mark of an individual man. White band on a wrist means faceless, man without identity. The red-bands are the few, “High Power,” trouble. The eloquence of one man’s walk: showing with the slightest movement of his shoulders the pride in his danger, the otherness of him.

On the 7000 block, the suicidals, the demented, the more than usually crazed, lie on beds, tethered and fetid. Faces to the wall as strangers go by. Scenes from a jail: hands reaching out of single cells, the sense of there being no other world, the deadliness of the air--no light, no sunshine, no laughter or song.

“The old has gone, the new has come.” Man does not walk alone in jail. He walks behind men who would jump him for his shoes, rape him for the smallest sign of weakness. Pill call: the moment of oblivion, the relief of symptoms, the burial of cause. Men buried out of time. Sleeping along darkened corridors, in holes that are cells, blankets over heads, sleeping time, forgetting time, doing time. “This place” says the chaplain “is crazy madness.”

How can any man walk out of here and be whole again? Chaplain Maciel says: “When I was in prison here, I did my time. I didn’t go sniveling.” He is the miracle, of course. When men send in “kites,” messages scribbled in pencil, desperate, asking to see the chaplain, he is the comfort, the word, the hope. He has served his time, his years of violence--loan-sharking, beating men up, fist against bone and flesh, red band, High Power. “Make ‘em bleed, split ‘em open. Taken ‘em out, so they’ll never come back for more.” His rule of life then.

The old has gone, the new has come: His comfort, His word, His hope. “Let me ask you,” the chaplain reaches over his desk, “how are you doing with the Lord?” Five feet, 8 inches and 205 pounds, the shoulders of a high-school wrestler, son of a prizefighter, dark eyes sharp in a passive face--the mask, many masks he wears above his button-down blue Oxford. He watches The Man, the deputies with their clean, clean uniforms and tight eyes, as The Man watches those who once were his cellmates.

And so they send their kites into him, and they come for their 15 allotted minutes. At 3:30, an Armenian’s turn: broken accent, broken face. He is here for murder. His wife has taken up with his best friend. A 60-year-old man, white haired, distinguished once, sobbing in this bare, abysmal hell, seeking comfort from a 30-year-old one-time convict who has found his Father’s pardon: “Lord,” Maciel prays, “I know this man’s heart aches and I pray you will give him your love, comfort and strength. Watch over him, Lord.”

Somewhere beyond Chinatown, behind Union Station, we have buried these men, our brothers. May He watch over them--and us, for prison softens no man.